American Happiness. Jacqueline Trimble

her distended face. I listen

      for each breath that rattles,

      spirit in a sack. Esprit, aspire, expire.

      Expiration date unknown. She has come

      to this. The old ways will not come to me.

      My palms turn outward and prayers fall through

      my open hands. Old women sing.

      I hiss at the moon and pray for sight:

      Wondrous and mystic light,

      embrace my soul,

      inflame my vacant eye.

      THE DAY AFTER HER MOTHER DIED

      She cannot wash the dish.

      Even the bowl is too full of an egg yellow

      she and her mother wore to a recital

      in the park. If she looks closely

      she can see lace forming

      in the suds. Some thing, small and hard,

      rises in her chest. She imagines

      she can take a knife and with one stroke

      divide herself.

      “No such luck,” her mother would have said.

      Instead, she settles for immobility,

      and there she stands, her gown soaked

      with dishwater, the bowl still

      in her hand. Visitors come.

      “Like clockwork,” her mother would have said.

      Their hands are always full—

      money, casseroles, prayers.

      “We are sorry for your loss,” they say,

      as if they cannot guess she is sorry too.

      Between the visits, she waits

      and waits for whatever comes next.

      “A watched pot never boils,” her mother would have said.

      Will someone, you perhaps,

      step out of the shadows of this house,

      seize this girl, and fold her in your arms,

      especially some night when she lies sweating

      afraid of the silence in the next room?

      THE RELATIVITY OF MIDLIFE

      When I was young, time was a desert stretching to the sea. A taste for salt and cowrie shells kept me on the move. Some days there were windstorms. Some days no oasis in sight. But everything was poetry, even the parched lips of camels, the sway of their haunches rhythmic as sex. Once, a plane fell from the sky, its wide hawk-like shadow foretelling the end of the story. Another traveler’s head caught the burning fuselage. To me, the blast was a firecracker, the buzz of a distant fly. I lay in tents woven of goat hair, wishing on the flecks in my lover’s eyes. Smells of roasted meat lingered in the air, on my fingers. My belly full to bursting with wine and dates too. Soon I would learn, most nights hold nothing but hard earth, and still I desired this journey to last and last.