Rowena Carenen
She Got SickFast.
And I couldn’t help. I wrapped my constant companion in a once white towel, forced the murky mixture of water and canned food, that smelled like rancid pate, down her throat with a syringe. Three times a day for a week. I held her, rocking, for forty-five minutes, and sang old hymns while she tried to purr. I’d lay on my stomach to tell her about my day so she wouldn’t be lonely under the bed. The last night she went blind and lost the strength that propelled her to the top of my dresser in pursuit of slips and hair ties. The vet and tech wept with me, let me hold her, soothe her, tell her I was so glad she picked me to be her mom. I’m still not sure, sometimes, how to say goodbye. There is still hair on my robe. Place on ThymeBooks on shelves
paintings on walls clothes in drawers and closets. Plates commingle wine glasses kiss and matching scissors sit atop the counter. A new home and all the boxes are empty and my shampoo sits in the shower. Even my reading nook nestles just so by the window. Sylvia sleeps schooched into my knee pit, snoring and sneezing. Bea and I are up past my bedtime with hot toddies and giggles and I am home. But sometimes, when I first wake before the sun shines through coffee colored curtains, I forget that I sleep alone and my rings are packed away. Tea TimeI want to stop
remembering your teeth on my earlobe, how just a whisper of breath hot from want creates chills. My sternum contracts. Tea sloshes, stains a manuscript of someone else's words and I sigh. Paper towels mop my mistake, preventing brown from running green ink, as I try to grow strong words. Bounty is not strong enough to clean crevices in my cranium where a stain darker, deeper than tea tints memories and I forget, for a moment, that I was too long steeped. Comments? |
Me, AgainThe witness stand was directly in front
of the defense table and I did not trip as I took it. I tried not to look at you wearing the coat from the suit I bought for Stephen's wedding with pants for the bank job you couldn't keep. I kept eye contact with our judge ("our" as if there were still a "we" to be had between you and me) and answered her questions. The wavering of my voice on "irrevocably" was not because I didn't believe it to be true but because I didn't want it to be. I don't want to be broken beyond repair. I want to look you dead in the eye and say "Fix it! Fix me! Fix us!" Ah, "us" again. But I nod instead and say "yes ma'am" and you don't cross me. You let me win and the judge congratulates us. Wishes us a Merry Christmas. Us. Bea and the Body DumpWe had had a day:
children gone, crying clients, and the end of the holidays that left us both wanting. The dead evergreen still cornered, shedding perfect green needles, needed to come down. Each ornament sorted, wrapped, and put away in the plastic Tupperware bins bought years ago at Target's after-Christmas sale. But what of the fir? No harvested forests lined our street and the neighbors can't all've had plastic. So I grab the discarded top sheet, once paired with a now hole-y bottom, and we wrap the tree like a body. We slide in red clay oozing up the heels of our boots, as we hoist overhead. Over the fence it must go but we underestimated the height of our hiding place. I hold the departed while she grabs the kitchen ladder praying our neighbors don't see. She climbs and I shove, sap sticking in my hair and clinging beneath my Saturday bra. Our giggles explode into shrieks, it is finished. Skinned KneesI thought I was done
with the body wracking sobs that make my eyes swim red as the vodka cranberry I slurp through a bendy straw. Hope is horrible because she does not belong to the one holding her in a wrought iron cage, the tease. Hope made me her bitch and I thanked her for the opportunity to have my knees give out under what-ifs and possibilities. I did not stumble, I collapsed broken on cobble stones that skin my weak knees until the caps poke out of the ripped skin and no bandaid big enough to stop the bleed. |