I was born and raised in the midwest, although I've lived in NYC for nearly 30 years. Recently, my mom said she and her sister were planning to visit Turkey Run State Park in Indiana, a place where I went a lot with my family while growing up. Complex layers of memories revealed themselves to me, both joyous and tragic, from long ago yet clear as yesterday. I was born and raised in the midwest, although I've lived in NYC for nearly 30 years. Recently, my mom said she and her sister were planning to visit Turkey Run State Park in Indiana, a place where I went a lot with my family while growing up. Complex layers of memories revealed themselves to me, both joyous and tragic, from long ago yet clear as yesterday.

Anne E. Johnson is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. She works primarily in arts journalism--you can find her work on music and theater in Copper Magazine, Classical Voice North America, and elsewhere--and fiction. Nearly a hundred of her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies, and she has six published novels currently in print, including a humorous science fiction trilogy called The Webrid Chronicles. Her website is AnneEJohnson.com.

My granddad told us
my newly dead grandma Had wanted her
ashes strewn along a creek In Turkey Run State
Park.
It was her favorite
place on Earth. He never did get
permission for that.

Sick for two years,
my sister died at twenty-nine. Once she mentioned
how she'd like her ashes To be sprinkled in
Turkey Run.
Another of her
dreams not realized. Her casket is in a
cemetery outside of Baltimore.


For all Turkey Run
disappoints the departed, It fills the living
and the memory with joy. The pungent, mossy
scent of eternally wet rock, The brackish brown
of Indiana sandstone. Can it be thirty
years since I last was there?

My mom and her
sister take car trips sometimes To hike down the
gorges and up to the overlooks. Being past seventy,
they take their time And keep their eyes
peeled for turkeys, I presume.
We used to see them
crouched behind slender leaves.

That park is full
Of my loved ones
And their ghosts.