Lindsay Wilson

 
Divorce as Fever Dream

After she left, she came back in a dream
to announce her leaving. Dear Subconscious,

try harder. In that dull-white night the sky
finally tired of laying itself down as snow.

You both watched the old dog ghost the yard
and plow her nose to the hoof prints leading

to the back corner. I wanted out before
the first winter storms, she said. On the soft-white

patio, breaths before us, the sun slipped
loose along the mountains, and the steam rose

from the dead-grass fields, gray and thin.
The old dog returned from the far corner of yard

as a wild horse, bored of the banter. Your mind
stomped your hooves and tossed your mane

before galloping away into the eastern light. You
heard the brittle land under your running,

and while watching the sun’s one good eye stare 
down the translucent moon, the yellow-winged

black bird, from the snow shawled cottonwood,
tuned the five-strings of her voice.

Divorce as Transubstantiation

The snow spit shines
the parking lot where the wild horses wander
like the homeless. I’m becoming

one of those people who cannot step
out of the car until the song finishes.
                                                          
It tells me I can be anyone.
                                     I can be the man
checking the weather for all the places
he’s lived.
                 I can be the man watching
through the oven’s grease slicked window
the bones darkening for homemade broth.

I can find a use for the ends of carrots
and the strange, green growing garlic, plunder
the last wrinkled sweet potato in the box.

On my list between
chicken feet and buttermilk I wrote

transubstantiation. I remind myself it’s

colder in Wyoming, that I am becoming
the Patron Saint of Collander
and Cheesecloth.
                            My ex-wife said

this common clear stock flecked
with coarse black pepper can cure anything,

but I’ve sung goodbye so many ways

Lindsay Wilson, an English professor in Reno, Nevada, is the author of No Elegies and The Day Gives Us So Many Ways to Eat. His writing has appeared in The Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, and Narrative. website

<< Julie Marie Wade
 

Marc Petersen >>