Evidence of a Struggle Published December 2018 issue of Write Launch Literary Magazine poetry In my dream I knew why you were lying on the davenport at 5:53 am
your red velvet housecoat pulled up around your chin. I stood faced pressed against
the shuttered slats of the bedroom door creeping so close to the crack between the two panels that sweet varnish
filled my head and the loneliness of you breakable and unguarded
pinched between the two doors bunched up my chest and pounded my ears.
The front room glowed with the hum of a white collared man with no
beginning or end pulling his voice up and down the ladder of believability
as he called blessing upon blessing down upon his audience which made me wonder what
does it mean to call a blessing down upon an another as if someone can ever know
what moves a heart what rips a soul what shreds a spirit.
Didn’t this man ever learn that all sins will be forgiven except
the ones that can’t be? In my dream your eyes were not ringed with shadows of grey
and your night did not spill its guts all over the beginning of your day
leaving your face a trail of clues as obvious as the tracks my kids leave when they’re up to
their shit when I am gone. Then, though, I had no idea why you clutched the heating pad
that way in the wee hours of the day while the white collared man prattled on since I had never known you
to be religious a day in your life. His voice emptied me out
as I tried to fall back to sleep staring at my pile of freshly folded clothes washed sometime in the night
now a monument to the evidence of a struggle as they perched on the
embroidered seat of the little rocking chair by the bed.