When my rings don’t fit I think of my grandmother’s hands
SUSAN MUTH
She used to keep a bulbous jar
of pickled eggs atop the fridge,
glowed pink in the crimson brine.
I never once saw her eat one,
but I can picture the scene as if
I did—her lacquered nails
closed in on a particularly round egg,
sunk into the fleshy white to fish
it out, and when she bit down,
a suctioning sound, all that moisture
broken with the pressure of veneers
meant to hide teeth rotten
from cigarettes and wine, the tear
in the egg white flimsy from the bite.
SUSAN MUTH is a Best of Net and Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. A graduate of George Mason University's MFA program, she is the winner of the 2025 Cream City Review Summer Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ocean State Review,Pinch, West Trade Review, and others. She is the executive editor of Off Season Mag and lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her fiance and two cats, Ducky and Cleo.
