Short Form ✍︎

…this would truly be the worst place to die. At the embassy, 

Sitting below lights frothing sanitary yellow

Above tiles clean enough to be mirrors

Though this place has nothing or all to do with mirrors.

Looking at the spell and its casters before me saying pay a fee

Sign and be 

Let divide and free

Done. Ice water or barley tea?

Of course, it won’t be official for a few months,

Spending that time and all of the time before it

Jealous of my genes

Which are immutable unlike me

Choose for me, thank you, Mr. Wizard.

Don’t you guys need air? It’s stuffy in here

I’m turning to stone like I’m on border patrol

And you’re all wearing smiles as narrow as your eyes

Mr. Wizard returns, in grim looks

He’s chosen water for me

His pale hand reaches into his pocket

And throws me a straw and so I suck and wander

These tiles have been scrubbed suitable to represent the country

Clean cuts, sure demarcations

So seamless the divots

Tiles all on their own…

These hands are not mine at the end of each day. I’ve told him this once before, just as his  body rolled over and just after the light switched off. I’ve told him that I wake up with my hands and fall asleep with someone else’s. He pretends not to listen to me. He pretends that he’s already drifted away. Yes, he’s been drifting away for quite a while now. But my husband heard me. I know because the morning after I caught him looking at my hands as I poured his coffee and that evening I caught him again as I dried the dishes. And he’ll never admit that I’m right and he’ll never say what we’re both thinking. Instead, he’ll make a resolution as empty as the bottles he  hides in the second drawer to the left on the bottom row of his workbench in the basement  beneath the false cardboard bottom and scattered drill bits. He says the pork chops are dry.  

My mother was a musician’s wife. Well, she was the wife of a man who booked gigs at  Ludwig’s every Friday and worked on cars whenever someone’s stopped working. There’s this  image I have of her that’s so strong I can’t tell if its holy or damned. The kitchen window above the sink is spilling Saturday silent light into the room. I see her standing there letting the sun’s  heat come down on her and the steam from the hot water rise toward her. She makes a silhouette so black against the window that for a moment I don’t think she’s there at all. I think that someone has cut the shape of my mother’s body from a piece of paper and made a hole so quiet it would be blasphemous to ask her for a glass of orange juice. And even if I did ask her for a  glass of orange juice, I would get two sips worth because the carton needs to be split among Danny Henry Maggie Kate Micheal and me and daddy hasn’t come home from Ludwig’s yet with the earnings he promised and Jerry shouldn’t let him sleep there anymore its bad for his  back and how can he work on cars and put food on the table if he can’t move because he’s been  sleeping on a bar stool every Friday and anyway those two sips are your breakfast and I’m making mashed potatoes again for dinner now run along and look out the window and see if  daddy’s coming home please. I don’t ask her for orange juice. I don’t ask her for anything, really.  But he does. He asks her mean stupid things. He comes back from Ludwigs and spits fights into  the calm and now they’re both boiling as hot as the dish water. And we sit down to dinner and he  doesn’t say anything. Well, he says the pork chops are dry. Anyway, my mother the musician’s wife looking out the kitchen window like that is this image I can’t shake. Maybe it’s because instead of asking for orange juice when I was a kid, I walked up and held her hand.  

I’m washing the dishes now. I don’t notice when my husband walks into the kitchen. I don’t even notice when he gets closer and grabs the drying towel. He’s tired. I can tell by the way his stomach jolts sharper with each inhale. I’m tired, too. I want to be done with these dishes and sit on the front porch and come back in and turn off the lights and feel foreign to myself and fall asleep. I want to be done. But the first dish I pass to my husband, he puts the dish down and slips  my hand into the towel. And he looks at it. At the cracks gathering soap and redness on the knuckles. At the ring finger too skinny now to hold the ring when wet so I always set it on the  windowsill. At the sunken skin from steaming dish water making each finger a drunken sailor on  a drowning boat. He knows whose hands these are now. He doesn’t say anything. Well, he says he’s sorry.