The Dropping of (1)
Windows become
widows and you mourn the loss
of. Say I cannot see clear
with cotton caught
in the screen, remnants
of winter on the glass.
And wasn’t he a good man?
The plate thrown against
the wall. Stomping down the hall.
All the silent days. Pout and grouse.
Spring cleaning meant the screens propped
against the west wall. Warm water and a rag
while he waxed the car in the drive
and whined of birds.
You two birds, two of a kind.
Later, the purple finch flew headlong, lay stunned.
Was gone
when we next looked.
widows and you mourn the loss
of. Say I cannot see clear
with cotton caught
in the screen, remnants
of winter on the glass.
And wasn’t he a good man?
The plate thrown against
the wall. Stomping down the hall.
All the silent days. Pout and grouse.
Spring cleaning meant the screens propped
against the west wall. Warm water and a rag
while he waxed the car in the drive
and whined of birds.
You two birds, two of a kind.
Later, the purple finch flew headlong, lay stunned.
Was gone
when we next looked.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books, 2021) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, Permafrost, RHINO, and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Art: Public Domain