Dogged Hearts

Fireflies at the Altar

The air here does kind of taste like lemons,
thought the boy in the hammock, swaying
his way to the future. The bride would be

dead within the year, everyone in their finery
knew this. Which was why she brought the boy
along, nestled in yellow petals that trembled

with each footfall. She’d invented him exactly
three days after diagnosis, whispering
to her ovaries as she fingered childhood photos

of the man waiting now on the altar, all full
of this wedding and the way he would hold her.
The gathered ones gaped at the gray of her,

the size of his love. She cared less for its heft
than for his knowing how to tame it: sex,
the purest kind of barely-touching. Now

her body was in her dress, the ring was sliding
onto her finger. Everyone watching her become
“one” with the man who couldn’t come along.

Fire raging in the room above his head, the boy
dreamed he was brushing his teeth with fireflies,
which were not hot, but yellow, dry, and feathery.

Lew’s Late Love

The fourth month flowers waxy and small.
Grief is like sleeping in water, he thinks. Like
throwing light onto the smallest stone. It is
like scolding a doorjamb for crushing a finger
in third grade. Her finger. Now in the ground.
The same one she fractured flying off a treadmill
the day her first husband walked away. Why
these vignettes that long preceded him, now,
his ninety-first day without her? Long week after
week in a world now narrow. A runner instead
of a proper rug. If he could stand her there, across
the disbelieving room, he’d ask, all sheepish, how
she was doing without hunger. He can hear her
smile: “Look at the lake. Tell me I can’t have it.”

What Tess Wants

A wooden bowl, fragrant oil, and a good
half hour. Cello to accompany a careful task,
not one draught. Please, not a forest but a bevy
of single trees. Oh and I want him far away
or at least his anger. Like that voice that says
we’ll be erased when we hang up, I wish he
would. I wish he’d stop painting the house and
discover color. I want my arms heavy with sun
like boughs with snow and everyone’s heads
to stop hurting. I want a weeded house,
an ocean a month, time with my spice grinder.
I’d like one day someone new to make me supper.
I don’t want to feel marinated or married, but
yes, one flower — wild — worthy of a vase.

Edith’s Roofer Dream

Raw day, and I’m practically up in the clouds
next to some hard-hat hollering to another over
din of metal, smell of tar. The second guy grins back:
Verbal abuse is nine-tenths of the law! Swear to God.
Yeah, I guess I’m invisible—and plus somehow I know
at home on his dresser in a heap of change is the key
to a box he’s terrified to open. Where does this stuff
come from? Meanwhile, a third man, heavyset, stoops
in the rubble, pretends to search for something, but
really he’s worrying about how to fix the membrane
between him and the world, recently torn, letting stuff
leak in and out. Whaddaya mean you didn’t wanna be
a roofer? booms a voice from above. Noon whistle
shrieks. All the guys on site grab their lunch boxes,
sit in a ragged circle. Remove their shirts, thermoses,
and Tupperware and—I kid you not—burst into tears.

Decade Parade

The Broker adored Hildegard of Bingen—
but was a pussycat like my ex before the X.
Flannel Shirt was into conspiracy theories
and Sportswriter wanted a wife bad—
and found one a couple weeks after I passed
on the job. Bob #2 had some cockamamie
ideas about harnessing sexual energy. I knew
he was right, but he so wasn’t. Head of Hair
wore a retainer and funny underwear.
None of them could be called Que Será or
sidelong or had, to my knowledge, a tattoo.
One had a performance problem and resembled
Howard Dean (neither of which was the problem).
Junior partner had a head of hair, too, but O
so much blather. No, I’m not a bitch and yes
have many flaws, but the old friend is way
too old a friend and the high school geek,
while handsome now, is still one. Three ex-wives
or permanently single, the whole lot of them
were too damned something. That slow food activist,
though, he saw through me in a way I don’t yet
get. Which has me considering invisibility—
a counter-intuitive and possibly counter-
productive strategy, but maybe a good cover,
as I scan the crowd for a tattooed, bald
widower not named Bob, reluctant, loose-
limbed, and wearing linen, who gives good talk.