He hadn't asked for orchids
On the table in the home they have shared
for more years than I am old,
he serves pancakes, his specialty,
golden and certain and round.
She is with us, surely, we know it and we don't.
Jenn Mattern AKA Breed ‘Em and Weep, no longer breeding, only sometimes weeping, still blogging.
On the table in the home they have shared
for more years than I am old,
he serves pancakes, his specialty,
golden and certain and round.
She is with us, surely, we know it and we don't.
Your pillow, my love
lies untouched, tells me nothing.
No mail, no call. Who?
You could tell her that someday she'll be standing at a sink
scrubbing the three-day old pot, thinking about a boy
she used to know but doesn't dare mention.
Last night Sir James came upstairs for the first time. In life, his bad hips prevented him from making the climb. At bedtime, I gently carried his floral tin of ashes to my room and set him by the bed. I placed one smooth black stone from Iceland on the tin.
You don't come around,
she says
over her basket of clean laundry
below the horizon of clothesline
and rose gold. She doesn't know
what tone to take anymore so
her fingers do the talking now,
sifting through her apron pocket
of wooden clothespin soldiers.
Oh, Jarle, my Norwegian earworm!
When you ask her
where her shoes are,
she tells you finally,
haltingly
that she's outgrown
them all.
Turns out she's been wearing her
battered, torn snowboots to class
for two months, maybe three.
She's been wearing them
all the time, whatever the weather.
"Are you crying?" asks my songbird.
She leans in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a bath towel. Damp and pale and shining, she has just emerged from what she would call an "epical" (epic + magical) shower, where she's been singing for 45 minutes.
More fun, please, with a side
of ombré and razoring.
Tell no one of my dark past,
my ashy roots, mined silver.
It's my hair and I can curl
if I want to. You know what
they say about the little girl
with the curl in the middle
of her forehead, or you don't.
Chopped, cropped, ready
to co-opt stray laughter,
impertinent glances,
insouciant thinking, even
a bit of winking. Bring on
the parade of unremembrance,
rainbows all bows, no rain.
Give blasphemy a whirl.
King Richard III has been sleeping off
the winter of his discontent just below
the concrete of a municipal parking lot
in Leicester.
I could not find the bone you insisted you'd already
thrown my way, or I'd have gnawed on that too,
to take the edge off—or create one.