frost
It’s the jolt of a realization
Followed by the dust settled brushing quiet of understanding
You knew all along.
The star-stuff
The pinch of blood from the inside
Red on white cotton like a slap
Life filling and filtered
Through me like an hourglass
Measure it out - forty weeks on the nose.
The doctors in their white coats
Told me I couldn’t have known so early
But I felt gold flake in my veins,
A magnetic field around me.
Your skin gets thicker, freckles rearrange.
I felt her in my body in an instant, the smell of creation like
The sulfur of a struck match.
And I felt him snuff like a dying candle.
The pull away
The vacancy of an empty chair
Still warm
In a cold room.
While she was growing he
was shrinking into the sidelines
One step
Two steps closer to the door.
Two things he wouldn’t say
One the cradle and one the grave
The suggestion hung over me like an Iowa rain
The anxiety of the thick downpour
No one understands a wordless push like a woman.
Nudging me toward a smaller
And smaller
Door inwards while I grew
Outwards, like
The subtle change in anatomy and architecture can work
As an inverse archetype if you feel trapped
Enough.
I was growing, ever shifting
He did not
Move, the silent stare
The glassy eyes of non-compromise
The concrete stance
The immobility of man when faced
With the inconvenient.
Pity the man
Who does not do the killing himself
But will eat anything you place
At the table.
Laying his dinner with fork and
Wire hanger.
Serving veal still red with life
Nose upturned
He did not see the irony in our position
I the chef
While he just devoured.
Loathe is the coward.
Loathe is the fool who cannot
Place cause and effect
Loathe is the victim with gloves of
Gunpowder
And I choked back the tansy
Bled flowers like constellations on the carpet and when
She came
Palm small like a secret
I wept for the last thing I would ever hold that
Saw god’s face.
I buried her in the fall.
Under a persimmon tree.
Such sour fruit for all the sweetness
I could have claimed to be
For her. In another life
In another world.
In a different
Happy
Home.