I See You

You open the door and you reach inside. Inside your mailbox, there is a package. You remove this package and take it up the stairs. Entering your home, you set the package that used to be in your mailbox on top of the kitchen counter.

You turn around, opening your refrigerator, removing two eggs from their carton placed on the top shelf. You crack the eggs into a skillet, their jaundiced gaze tracking your movements across the kitchen as you gather seasonings to sprinkle in their yellow eyes and make them run.

The package sits on the kitchen counter waiting for you to grab a sharp object and slice into it, peeling back the tape, ripping off its paper skin. Inside the package, still on the kitchen counter, opened with the knife that's still in your hand, you find two eyes looking up at you. There's no movement for them to track, as you stand, fixed in place, engaged in one of those staring contests from childhood.

The note to the side of the eye on the left, the eye that's the same brown as your lover's, reads, "I can love you now, with all your flaws."

You reach out to your lover's eyes and take one in each egg-grimed fist, and hold them to your chest, thinking, "Perhaps these eyes can hear my heart beating faster at being so loved."

Righteous Reunion

You are ready to greet death
Monstrous barbarities all past
Only one future atrocity remains:
The offense granted by
Your loosened bowels
As you swing pendulously

There was a time you flew
Your face emblazoned
On banners borne on desert winds
Crowds chanted your name

Only taunts meet you now
A dissonant counterpoint
To your mumbled prayers
Recited much too late

The noose is placed
A rope ring promising
An eternity together:
With one grandson
Martyred with your own
Two, meeting you at death

Mama's Smile

I love it when Mama sings me to sleep. Her voice calms me until my body feels like it’s falling down, down through my feather pillow, down through the depths of my water bed, down, down, down, all the way down to dreaming.

I wake up to the sound of Mama. She’s not singing.

She sounds really happy and I wonder what she and Mommy are doing having so much fun this late at night. I like it when Mama is happy, ‘cos she’s usually so serious and Mommy and I take every chance we can get to make her laugh. To see Mama’s teeth when she smiles is like seeing a double rainbow: it doesn’t happen all the time, and I always look forward to seeing it again.

Mama used to smile all the time, and her teeth looked like they belonged on one of those toothpaste commercials. But, that was before she got attacked by the bad man. I was so scared she wasn’t ever coming home from the hospital, but Mommy and Uncle Devin both promised me Mama would be all right and she was. Well, almost.

When Mama came home a few days later, she was missing her front teeth just like me. I asked her what the Tooth Fairy brought her and she almost smiled and said the Tooth Fairy brought her home to me and Mommy. At first, I was glad that me and Mama were both waiting for our teeth to grow back. But then, when my teeth grew back and hers didn’t, I felt bad. Mama said not to worry. She and Mommy were saving money to get her smile back the way it was before.

That was months ago. Since then, Mama’s been staying home a lot more. Mommy says it’s ‘cos Mama’s embarrassed to go out and have people see her missing teeth. I asked Mommy why she couldn’t get Mama’s teeth fixed with her insurance like she did when I broke my arm last summer, and she said it didn’t cover Mama ‘cos they’re not really married. I must have looked confused ‘cos Mommy said she’d explain it to me later.

Anyway, it’s so nice to hear Mama in a good mood right now. Almost as good as her singing, but still good enough to make me fall all the way down back to sleep.