chocolate
(For workshop today I gave the prompt “20 things about yesterday,” hoping to get people to write in more detail. One took it as a much-needed exercise in memory recall. Another took it as a chance to mix a concrete form with philosophical digressions. Another made a list poem. I, as usual, hung onto visual details and hinted here and there at subtext.)
The dog looks brown, not black.
The air moves thick but the air shuts the door.
The dog-man has red in his beard but mostly white.
His beard creeps up into his lower lip.
Salty Dog, it says on his cap. He leaves it on inside.
When he adjusts it once, his hair is long and sparse underneath.
He talks slow as this land is flat.
The girl-dog doesn’t listen.
To obey means to hear.
Her brain is thicker than the air.
What cuts through: hot dogs.
The house ticks.
I chop the magda squash into squares,
the carrots into rectangles.
I don’t know how to chop the purple pepper.
The onion always slips under my hands.
We keep saying we need to sharpen the knife, but I’m glad for once it’s dull.
For lunch: bread and applesauce.
For breakfast: two hardboiled eggs.
After dinner, the teenager puts bees in my stomach when she turns up 95.5.
When she’s gone, I hunt for the m+m’s.
There is a point when guilt over chocolate is bigger than chocolate.
I eat the m+m’s in a trance in the car in Dexter, parked outside Nails, Etc.
The dogs settle.
It gets dark in half an hour. This last night of summer.
Fall can’t wait to hide that lake I haven’t noticed until now.
I practice what the therapist taught last year: of course you feel guilty about the m+m’s, you’ve been trying so hard to be good.
The teenager is back in the car and we switch to another radio station.
It’s a love song.
She sings along.
The dogs cannot ever contain themselves that she’s here.
