Spring 2014

 

The Prom Queen I Never Kissed

After dragging recycling bins

past two garbage bags

filled with cantaloupe rinds

and cat bones,

she spins her wedding band,

thinking mercy, thinking knuckles,

thinking about the one night stand

she had three days ago with the bartender

whose golden mullet

poured her three shots

of well bourbon into a Dixie cup.

 

She listens to water leaving a dishpan.

Her husband washes dinner down a clogged drain.

 

She crawls back into America’s cockpit and groans

against the monotonous

droll of potholes, Spanish moss

licking the top of her truck, where,

on the side, a logo

of two palm trees perched in a sand berm

display a phrase

she has tried and tried to forget: Enjoy Southern Living.

 

Two months pregnant.

Before spring.

 

Baby on her shoulders.

To meet a stranger is to forget one.

 

The farther she moves from my driveway,

the more I imagine her

singing My Heart Will Go On—

the song I danced to at senior prom,

swallowing spiked punch with the silent hope

of getting laid on crushed velvet

in the backseat

of a Buick LeSabre

behind a Denny’s dumpster.

 

She must be the prom queen I never kissed,

leaning over to accept her crown,

the Meredith with jet black hair

always wearing a necklace to match

her earrings.

 

She must be sporting the same jewelry,

tarnished under the salt of motherhood.

She must be singing loudly now, her phone

lost in the glove box,

but I can’t hear her singing

any more than I

can hear the dead,

who are with me,

watching from the hedgerows,

begging

 

in their own absence

 

to be seen, asking for one last dance with the woman

who never looked better in a dress.

The woman who walks between homes

she will never own,

tossing cigarettes into curbsides,

and the waiting.

 

---

 

 
King Bed Awakening

—Birmingham, Alabama

We booked a cheap hotel for our seventh anniversary. Inspired by Vulcan, we watched

Star Trek reruns,

until I passed out, then woke from night terrors, where a handful of dead babies—

their eyelashes

sewn shut—clawed

for the bowtie on my white tuxedo.

 

Here’s some baklava.

 

Let’s raise a glass to an old friend who—

upon returning from a road trip—

calls me standoffish.

 

This is no longer the dream.

 

I agree with all syllogisms pertaining to an orderly sequence

of events, but mostly,

I want a hot air balloon

and a pound of cheddar.

 

Call it what you want.

 

In the courtyard,

A homeless man proposes alien missionaries

from the Pleiades are coming.

 

They, he says, will release the ladder!

Their orbs will disappear!

They will preach the old religion!

 

 

I give him a dollar. Perhaps,

one day, We’ll crawl into bed

with the unknown and call it our own.

 

*

 
I’ve packed suitcases bigger than this room. Hyperbole? Sure, but what’s a strip club

without a Baptist nun?

What’s a planet without an alien race spinning bright orbs

through a nitrogen-rich

atmosphere? I lost my wife

before we even pulled back the sheets.

 

A celebration

to our wheat-bellied

existence, the

 

pitcher of tea

molding green

and gray

 

in our fridge

two-hundred miles

south of this hotel.

 

If we are the sum

of this room—

the lamp’s gold-plated

 

knob twisted

with thumb

and forefinger, or

 

the lamp itself—

we still must

make the bed.