Moonshiners and Horse Thieves: My Ancestry
by Brianne Kreppein

Shades of blue and white flannel,
worn-in against my skin.
Not directly, but strangely,
it made its way to my closet
after my grandpa passed away.
He used to wear a uniform of flannels
and suspenders and jeans.
Used to be a lineman in the war.
Used to stable horses out back.

He never talked about the war,
except to tell us that camels
will throw up on you if they get mad.
Oh, and the pyramids were a dump
at the time. He had a bad habit
of calling everything porn.
Truly everything. Saturday morning cartoons,
my six-year-old cousin’s gift bag from a birthday.

He and my dad would talk for hours about
our ancestry of moonshiner’s and horse thieves.
Did you know, Jette means throw in French?
Perhaps they threw us out of Canada.
No it must have been off the boat
going back to France.
Grandpa grew up speaking French,
but he couldn’t speak it anymore.
He told me this from his armchair,
where his flannel shirt hung over the worn cushions,
on one of my later visits.

The tone of my voice was impossible for him to hear,
so my dad always had to be with us, translating.
Just like his flannel shirt went first,
to another, and only later made its way to me.