Sometimes endings are opportunities,
she says. Her cheeks discredit her, rose with early romance. I hear her screams when she’s banging a new boyfriend, milking it like a tourist grinning and waving outside The Today Show. But sure I agree, like when ER ends. If I pry myself off the couch after next week’s preview, I can take out the trash, move the laundry to the dryer, grab another beer, and be back in time to spark one as The Daily Show begins. Opportunity. My mother’s gastric bypass. Dry cleaners raking it in on hems and mends. Seven bucks for every pant leg my frictive thighs burn through.
She was only talking about love. Trying to ease the blow. Distract me from the stink as I come to on the heap. Smoking bag of stomped shit. Sometimes they’re not. Balloons pop, tires deflate, varmints become road kill. A closed book is an excellent doorstop. Flat line. Last call assgrab. Scanning the room for a kindred pair of roaming eyes.
Six beers and two bowls later, we’re talking on his mattress. A rare Sam Cooke album gets my shirt off, but as he furiously humps my leg, I sober, tire, dress and go. The walk is uphill, and the street lights look more orange than yellow. Emptying my pockets wondering if I’m happy to be home, I find the gift I forgot I’d been given: a Ziploc baggie full of tiny laminated poems.
October 15
I remember her
in the ways the flower
remembers the sun
in the cold evening.
I know again. I knew already.
