{"id":586,"date":"2013-11-27T03:28:33","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T03:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=586"},"modified":"2014-01-17T16:45:07","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T16:45:07","slug":"renting-out-the-front-room-after-dadee-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=586","title":{"rendered":"RENTING OUT THE FRONT ROOM AFTER DADEE DIED &#8211; Zorida Mohammed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hilda and her children are crammed into our front room.<br \/>\n$8 a month holds her whole life in it.<br \/>\nWhen her husband showed up blind,<br \/>\nhis whole family threw her out.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nThey had always known her greenish-grey eyes<br \/>\nwould bring them down.<br \/>\nWord was he caught her with someone else<br \/>\nand it happened just like that!<br \/>\nAll over Trinidad, and no doctor sees anything.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nA walking stick becomes an extension on his right hand,<br \/>\nchecking out the air close to the ground.<br \/>\nAs I gape and wait for him to fall,<br \/>\nhe walks ahead with his eyes wide open.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nHilda\u2019s trying to make her way.<br \/>\nHer children are quiet and lap at her heel like water.<br \/>\nThey stand close to the one-burner stove,<br \/>\na contraption that looks more like a Japanese lantern,<br \/>\nand watch her boiling chicken feet.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nHer sadness does not allow her to smile,<br \/>\nbut I can tell she is not bitter.<br \/>\nShe even gives me a plump chicken foot<br \/>\nwhen I sneak in to see her.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nAfter dadee died,<br \/>\nthe most surprising thing of all<br \/>\nis my parents going and renting out<br \/>\nher front room,<br \/>\njust like that!<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\n<em><b>Zorida Mohammed<\/b>\u00a0was born in Trinidad and immigrated to America at age 18. \u00a0She won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant for Poetry in 1991-92. Her poems have been published in\u00a0Folio, Fulcrum # 6 and # 7, Phoebe, The Caribbean Writer, Poem, The Oyez Review, Compass Rose, The Dirty Goat, The Spoon River Review, The Atlanta Review, and\u00a0The Distillery. She has also been published in\u00a0The Red Wheelbarrow\u00a0for the past four years. Zorida is an active member of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and reads frequently in Bergen County, NJ, and in New York City.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hilda and her children are crammed into our front room. $8 a month holds her whole life in it. When her husband showed up blind, his whole family threw her out. &nbsp; They had always known her greenish-grey eyes would bring them down. Word was he caught her with someone else and it happened just [&#038;hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-wassily-kandinsky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1591,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/1591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}