[
Anathema] [Half-Eaten]
When you sleep, your body betrays you.
Your back arches to my chest
Like a branch bending in the wind,
Almost breaking before it snaps back.
Your peaceful face accuses me of stupidity,
Of having been the parent
Who lost Travis, our child.
To have gone fishing
With a five-year-old
And returned with nothing,
Not even a fish.
He never even learned to swim,
You said when I returned alone.
And jerked the small rod from my hand
As though you could reel him
Back from his bed of water,
At night lake water condenses
In my chest.
I move away from your back,
Breaking the letter our bodies
Have formed together.
It is a forgotten alphabet--
Your shoulders, my hands,
Your breasts, my mouth--
A dance we deny.
I stare at the moonlight and shadows
Lingering on your face.
One half of anything
Amounts to nothing.
The night clothes you,
Musky air blanketing your skin.
I lift my hands, tracing your swollen belly,
Remembering our son you carry inside.
Stephen you will call him,
After your father.
You won't name our child after the
Derelict in this room,
This life.
Back to top
Half-Eaten
Getting my son out of the car
At McDonalds, I found the
Half-eaten peach he threw
Under his carseat last week.
A snack for later.
Later has found the skin shriveled and juices baked
Into itself from the angry sunlight.
He reaches for it, touching the the leathery skin.
I carry it to the trash and bribe him
With a hamburger,
While trying not to see the family a few tables down.
The toddler is strapped into her seat, screaming
For the half-eaten burger on the floor,
Well beyond her reach.
Her mother's face is etched in angry repose,
Her fingers clench the table,
Restraining.
It is not the child's tears which flicker in sunlight
But the hunger, shackled in tiny bones,
Taut flesh.
A prism which draws light in and shoots
A laserbeam touching
Nothing.
Back to top
