Evidence of a Struggle
Published December 2018 issue of Write Launch Literary Magazine
poetry
​
​In my dream I knew
why you were lying on the davenport
at 5:53 am

your red velvet housecoat
pulled up around your chin.
I stood faced pressed against

the shuttered slats of the bedroom door
creeping so close to the crack between the two
panels that sweet varnish

filled my head
and the loneliness of you
breakable and unguarded

pinched between the two doors
bunched up my chest
and pounded my ears.

The front room glowed
with the hum of a white
collared man with no

beginning or end
pulling his voice
up and down the ladder of believability

as he called blessing upon blessing
down upon his audience
which made me wonder what

does it mean to call a blessing down
upon an another
as if someone can ever know

what moves a heart
what rips a soul
what shreds a spirit.

Didn’t this man
ever learn that all sins
will be forgiven except

the ones that can’t be?
In my dream your eyes were
not ringed with shadows of grey

and your night did not spill
its guts all over the beginning
of your day

leaving your face a trail of clues
as obvious as the tracks my kids
leave when they’re up to

their shit when I am gone.
Then, though, I had no idea
why you clutched the heating pad

that way in the wee hours of the day
while the white collared man prattled on
since I had never known you

to be religious a day
in your life.
His voice emptied me out

as I tried to fall back to sleep
staring at my pile of freshly folded
clothes washed sometime in the night

now a monument
to the evidence of a struggle
as they perched on the

embroidered seat of
the little rocking chair
by the bed.