The meringue,
stacked high like skyscrapers,
looming over coconut cream and crust.
They groan with every bite.
Deep, vocal moans—as close as you can get

​

in polite company

​

to public sex.

​

It makes her happy
to make them happy.
To ladle rich gravy over buttery potatoes,
a hint of rosemary—her
dear grandmother living again
on their tongues,
briefly resurrected by the wizardry of recipe.

​

It makes her happy
to roll out dough every morning
for chicken and dumplings,
to drop pork chops into Crisco,
the pan staccato
the burn just so.

​

Their faces, shiny from warmth and grease,
from the conversation over a meal,
the zing of coffee and pie and
a cinnamon roll to go.

​

Cheeks, fleshy walls of happiness everywhere she looks.

​

She stops at McDonald’s on the way home
and doesn’t turn on the kitchen light.

​

She eats in the dark
and falls asleep on the couch.

Sitting with today snuggled in my lap,
I’m reminded of the time when my mind
went away for a sabbatical
from reason, leaving me stranded
in a land where reason was a shade
of blue I could not smell,
normalcy a taste I couldn’t touch,
decency and civility two pillars stranded, standing
on smoke supporting only airy ashes.

​

My mind took a break, the break then took my mind,
and sanity took a lover and checked in
for an extended stay at a seedy motel
across the tracks from the nice part of town.

​

Eventually, that changed,
the break kintsugied. Perhaps
I simply went for a walk, but
it could have been skywriting from a broomed former beauty.
Maybe I just lay down to read, or heard the words
from a genie escaping something once shiny,
or, in hindsight, maybe I
just made up some tale to explain what made no sense,
and a creation story that doesn’t matter in the least.

​

What does matter is,
when the sabbatical came to an end,
the final invoice was slipped under the door
and could not be ignored. Its tally dug deep,
deeper than the Nazca plains, or a child’s plastered hand print,
or the chiseled, shadowed cracks on long-life cheeks
that leave no doubt of the truth they contain—
Your life, I was informed, did not get better just for you to enjoy.

Yesterday my wife played with my mother’s dog

throwing the tennis ball from the kitchen to the

family room again and again making her happy

and animals have fewer words and more love

than humans until she said something is wrong

with the dog her jaw was quivering and I said

maybe she’s had too much and my mom said

no she just does that and so my wife knelt down

put the ball down petted her and kept her distance

because dogs don’t always like to be hugged

it takes their power away and she whispered it’s

okay it’s okay you can take a break you don’t have

to keep going and going until you quiver.