Laughing When You Mention The Other Woman

Along the wall
pictures of our children,
your announcement echoing
over the edge of this world,
now
past midnight and you gone--
no longer the middle of our lives.
Car trouble.
Getting thin.
Everything misshapen.

I keep pulling you out
of the family photographs,
pointing out your faults
then burying bones in the garden
underneath the cherry tree
where I stamp my feet
around the hardened earth
that refuses to lay flat.

With a minimum of digging
I find what appears as madness
growing like clumps of clay,
its rituals and maps coated
with dirt. I ceremoniously
expose the roots, hoping
to plant again.

The red of rage inside me
competes with blue sky
while at the same time I know
I must plug leaks in this old house,
paint the front steps
then hold my breath
and watch time do its job.

We met years ago
near river stones, rushing
water and sunshine. Everything
all smiles and promises.

That’s the joke of this poem.





Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake's Daughter: The Roads in and out of War, published by the University of Iowa Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in such places as Post Road, The Fourth Genre, The Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, The Florida Review and Lillith Magazine. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and teaches writing at Rochester Institute of Technology.