After she figured out what to do with her life
or the rest of her life or maybe just next in her life
she discovered the years months weeks days hours
minutes seconds lining up and waiting to be filled
although with what exactly wasn’t terribly clear.
Here was the question behind all the others:
what to do with this seemingly endless span that
was in fact finite or the fact that her demise was
only a matter of time and yet the exact instant in
all its startling specificity could never be divined
or the way mortality made a mockery of her effort
to figure out what to do next given her life might
end at any moment this seemingly ceaseless array
of years months weeks days hours minutes seconds
needing to be used lived spent then suddenly not.…
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Dunkin is out of vanilla syrup for your mid-afternoon latte. You get it anyway, but can’t bring yourself to drink it. A white Escalade behind you has cruise set to breakneck. Your eyelids droop. I should get over, you think. There’s nowhere to the right. Your eyes flick up and over, check the rear, check the driver’s side. The Escalade is still there. There’s a gap on the left. You start to jump lanes, dipping into a pothole that cradles your tire. Fleetingly, you dream the hollow is a large, black dog. You hit the brakes. The Escalade doesn’t.
– AJ Miller…
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We’re in the ultrasound room. I stare at the blank screen, it having only my information on it for now. It’s last November again. We’re here for the first time and all I am worried about is if the internal wand will hurt. Our doctor’s words remind me: honestly, it’s probably smaller than him. I never knew no baby was even an option. My tests told me positive, my symptoms told me pregnant. But the ultrasound showed that these were true and not. We both stared at that screen. Silence. We didn’t know we were staring at our miscarriage. But it is not then, it is today— so we stare at the empty screen and hope not to repeat history. The tech remembers us.…
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Ten days after Christmas,
a six-foot-four woman in heels
clops in front of me from
the convenience store bathroom,
her face sweats tree lights
with her candy cane eyes
as the scent of pine
lingers in the pop aisle.
Red tights blend thighs and cheeks
into a sack of presents now
leaning beside her man of five-five
who tosses another scratcher
into his pile of losers.…
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The door swung shut so fast it almost hit Joe in the ankle, almost nipping at his heel like a sheepdog would its misbehaving charge. Joe had slammed the door shut behind him for effect and it almost came back to bite him. In spite of his rage, he chuckled at that fact as he made his way down the weathered stairs of the rented beach house. He followed the trail that led through the dunes, covered in sea oats, to the Gulf of Mexico.
When one door closes, another one always opens. Joe had heard that theory although it was merely wishful thinking to him. The idea certainly couldn’t be counted on like Newtonian laws of gravity and motion. But in this case, the same shut door opened up again briefly, just long enough for Joe’s little sister to slip through and pull it shut behind her, closing it much more gently than Joe had done.…
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After Mom got too tired to get out of bed, that man she insisted on calling my dad couldn’t be bothered to pick up the slack.
He took money out of her purse and walked with me to the store. I made friends with a little girl while he was inside. Her face tasted like peanut butter.
When he came back out, that man had a big box and he stood there by the trash can pulling everything out except what he needed. He stuck some of those cords in his pockets and a stack of paper, too. The whole time he was mad at me for making too much noise and helping too much.
Finally, he pulled the important thing out. He had to crack it out of a white shell that sounded terrible when the pieces of it scraped together.…
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I read Ken’s poem online
about his father and the paucity
of love words
the mental leaps
across the gaps
of knowing love was there
it reminded me how Dad
loved us without ever
saying that word
without giving up
his helpful notes
on jobs we should apply for
or cars we might buy
or ways we should save money
like the way he saved words
his suicide note typed out
with his one good hand
apologized
for leaving the way he did
he was proud of each of us
and wanted us to care for mom
whom he said deserved
great love
and then he signed it
Dad
– Mimi Whittaker
Note: This piece was originally self-published in a book called In a Dark Sea.…
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