Green Linden Press

Colorado

When I posted that my wife left
for a weekend of drinking wine in Colorado
with her two best friends,
and left me with two kids, three dogs
and 113-degree apocalyptic weather,
I didn’t mean to throw her under the bus.
I meant to throw her under the fuselage 
of a burning B-52. 
There’s a lot of room for revenge 
in a twenty-year marriage.
I’m sure I have it coming, and my wife, the Empress 
of Timely Responses, will find a way. 
The Greeks had a name for this sort 
of back and forth. They called it the House 
of Thebes. Sylvia, a survivor 
of two failed marriages, slurred to me late one night
in the back of a bar,
You’d be an avalanche of dysfunction to manage.
When you start a marriage you think 
you own a mansion,
and you watch your friends put mansions up next to yours.
From the veranda the particles 
of light blanch the magnolias to perfection
and the carpet smells clean. 
After a few years most of those mansions 
are gone, torn down
or set afire. But there you are still, 
you and her, not in a mansion anymore,
but in a rickety shack somewhere down in the industrial 
district next to the railroad 
and the power plant, the bulldozers and dump trucks
waking up in the early morning hours.
You and her, fighting over the last sausage and egg breakfast sandwich, 
the last cup of coffee, climbing into the cab together
and peeling out into the interstate, 
the dashboard warming your hands, her hands, 
a few specks of glass flashing under the wheels. 

Smelling Nice

Babies smell nice when they are born,
ask any mother.
Like sweet bread or talcum powder or lavender
bath soap or an overripe pear 
when you slice into it.
I wonder when I stopped smelling nice 
to my mother. Was it after I got caught 
stealing a Snickers at Plaid Pantry?
Or when she found a stack of Hustlers
in my bedroom? After
my first or second stint in rehab 
or when I said I hated her?
My high school girlfriend wore the same perfume
every day for four years. My body 
floated through the long hallways behind her 
as she walked. After she cheated on me 
smelling that perfume was like being hit by a green wave 
smashing you against the rocks.
I can’t blame her. My alcoholism seeped 
into everything, hijacked my mother and father and my brother. 
There are more than a trillion 
smells human beings can recognize. 
It’s true. I googled it. 
I love the smell of rain on the warm pavement 
and the smell of grape Kool-Aid 
just after it hits the water. 
My mother died on a hospice bed with blue sheets
in my parent’s living room just after 1 a.m. 
My father wanted more time so he left her there.
The next morning friends came with flowers and cards.
Everyone cried and kissed my mother’s forehead. 
The phone rang and rang and rang. 
We ate donuts and bacon and eggs 
for breakfast. My mother no longer smelled like my mother. 

The Earth Sciences

It was a mistake when Larry told his high school 
biology teacher to EAT A DICK. 
He could have voiced his displeasure
in a more constructive way. 
His mother, a conservative in her fifties with a tight 
blonde perm, worked at the same school as a counselor
and walked the long hallway 
to the principal’s office on a Thursday 
to take him home, heels clicking the hardwood floors. 
Someone lights off a ladyfinger at the back of class 
and the boom echoes for decades.
Larry was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
27 years later, newly sober, his mother’s ashes 
dissipated now in an unnamed forest on the Olympic Peninsula,
he no longer remembers the teacher’s name, 
only that the name was a landmark.
Was it Mr. Street or Mr. Boulevard? 
Larry watched his friends move away to college,
vacation in Barcelona, get married
and have children while he drank 
and struggled to keep a job at Boyd’s Coffee.
He drove out one night 
on an old forest road where he opened the trunk 
to shotgun the leaves with his brains
but woke on the couch the next morning instead.
Mr. Causeway never let Larry back into his class
and Larry never dabbled in the earth sciences again. 
Most of us could grow an orchard 
in the middle of an uninhabitable tundra 
with the sum of our mistakes.
Sometimes I imagine the two of them sitting together 
in my kitchen late at night, long after my wife 
and children have gone to bed, 
when the music must be played softly
so no one will wake, sharing the table, 
the wolverine and the bear, moonlight 
pouring in through the windows
and forgiving their scarred faces.