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Margrethe H K Oct 2014
I don’t want to hear people’s stories
but they come anyhow

Through the drone of rain on a tin roof
or a train passing deep in the night

How this one will never marry again
there are no good women left

How that one can’t get off the pills
her kids are uncontrollable

The stupid ****** ******* get-togethers
where someone always has to bring it up

About the lucky ******* who invented the paper clip
and never has to worry again

My sister left her kids
even the baby
the asthmatic one

Stammering ma-ha ma-ha all night long
her husband phoning every hour

no, nothing, not yet

The neighbor dog’s insistent whining
somebody forgot to feed him

and the dull weight of a child in my arms
crying for a mother
long gone
Margrethe H K Oct 2014
pushes his plate toward me and says he didn’t order eggs.  On the bar-stool next to him a woman in penguin pajamas is filling out a job application.  I take the eggs, replace them with a bowl of acorns and he salts them down, licks his upper lip, each fleshy tip of tongue curling away from the other.  My dad had hair like yours, I say, thick and red.  When I was five I used to brush it, but one day he asked me to and I said no.  He pours dirt in his coffee and stirs it with a piece of wood.  The door jingles open and a young couple stand on the mat shaking ice from their curls.  The woman in penguin pajamas is asleep with her thumb in her mouth.  Soon after that he went away and I never saw him again.  A teakettle whistles and the young couple begins to dance, the bells on their shoes ringing, flashing silver shards of light across the walls.  Forty-five years old, some days still think it’s my fault.  The man with the lizard tongue leans in, mouth opening.  His tongue traces the swell of my bottom lip; I taste salt and dirt.  Outside a catfish swims by the window, its eyes as big as dinner plates.

— The End —