Sunday Lunch
Your cardigans were
pressed and ironed like fresh sheets
on a cold bed, that coated my skin
and made it white.

Hair sticking up in different directions
because you were unaware that the
recliner you sat on was filled with static,

shocking your bones.

Breaking words muttered through
lips dusted pink.

Plants resting in blotched hands
dressed in soil that moved and lived.
White specs like tiny bubbles
pumping air into a growing tree of apples,
green.

A comb too thin to stay between caloused fingertips,
sugared from jelly beans and chocolate cookies.
Combing thin grey hair patched on a soft skull
covered with velvet on Sundays.

The potatoes your wife made you,
no salt,
when the family gathered holding
cold hands around the kitchen table.

Matte wrinkled eyes under the buzzing of the light,
and the toothless grin on your face
that warmed the room from the
cracks in the windows.

 

The Party
I can’t stand the way you always ask
if I’m okay when you know I’ll say
yes.

Please go.

Enjoy the party with the red grins
staining yellow teeth washed over
with drink in bottles clasped tighter
than your hand on mine.

I no longer want to inhale the
same perfume on clothes with
price tags, dangling down backs
like strings of a puppet.

Plastic cheeks dotted red.

Standing in a room that feels colder
than those eyes filled with nothing
but black snakes in the night water,
no swimming star.

I want to climb grey carpet upstairs
clinging wooden railings
sticky.

Blurry vision
people moving

lay down and kill the voices
infesting my head who keep pounding
fists on bone,

Please go.