Secret
They talk with the lights off, / words kept in bedroom dark so this moment will live
/ for only them. They speak of finances and bedtime policies, / whether they’ll need
to move for more space. They trade names the other nixes out of hand: / an old
boyfriend, a girl from fourth grade who picked / her nose red every other week, the
Salinger character she’s always hated. /
He turns quiet then, / and when she asks if
he’s mad she doesn’t like it, he lies / there instead and shakes his head No, trying to
remember what other names / he’d held close to him those nights he was sixteen,
seventeen / and lonely in the darkest rooms / of his heart, waiting to touch, to be
touched. We’ll agree / on something. No need to rush, he manages and puts one hand
on hers, his other stretched over her bellybutton, settling / for comfort over truth. /
Who should we tell and when? he asks. /
Our moms first, maybe our fathers, too, in a few weeks. /
The rest, after we get into the second trimester, she says. There’s much less chance…
She stops there, / the rest of her sentence she’d rather not catch yellow light / from
the streetlamp angling through the blinds. He knows enough to fill / the blanks, but
he’s never worried before / this could be lifted from them. He takes his hand from
hers, / and as he pretends to need to stretch his arm, / knocks on the wooden
nightstand, lightly, / a whispered plea meant to be heard by someone or something,
/ somewhere far outside this room.
Sleepless #1
No sleep, not tonight. Not for her and not for him. / Each dose, each sip of water
heaves her / from bed to toilet. She has become so practiced she doesn’t need / to
flick the switch to find her way or have him hold / back her hair as bitterness hurtles
out her throat. / She hides in the dark like he can’t / hear the retching, more
inhuman than familiar, / as if suffering is only carried through the world / by light. /
He wishes she would give him her / blessing to surrender to the long day. / He wills
himself sleepless when he hears her flush, / when she slips back in bed, / her sharp
sighs exhaled into the air. He stirs, at first, making a show / he might be with her, /
minus the throat burn and acrid taste on her tongue, / her knees bruised from the
bathroom tile. He does not wake / enough to care for her how she needs him. He is
already / breaking free.
Guilt
There is nothing more he can do for her; they will keep her / for observation, give
her more fluid, / inject her with medication as she needs. / He still doesn’t know
enough to be afraid / or hopeful. He doesn’t know whether to focus on their baby,
hanging / the photo on their fridge as reminder of what will come, / or to think only
of her. All he knows could fill / a thimble. All he knows is maybe / tonight he will
stretch across their bed as he hasn’t done in weeks, / fearful as he’s &been to touch
her / and wake her from whatever sleep she’s managed to make come. / It’s enough
to have him cry / Enough! because how is it right to look forward to a night’s peace /
when she’s hooked to a machine trying to guarantee a present / she can barely
afford?
Deuteragonist
Alone to celebrate the third anniversary of becoming a couple, / he eases onto the
porch swing to rock / himself tired. He watches the neighbors’ houses begin to shut
themselves away: / cars’ headlights blink twice, horns beep them locked, / then
again when someone second-guesses. Houselights slump mute across the first floor,
/ the second once teeth are brushed, prayers said, books read, / and moms and dads
slide into bed, fantasies / of a second wind never winning over the quiet / dark
brings. /
This night, this moon shining lightly makes it easy for him to see / himself
plain. He’s never been the protagonist, / never comfortable as the center of his own
story. / Drifting to the outer limits of a party, a camera-shot, is second nature. She is
the life / of all the rooms they’ve ever entered, he gladly playing second / fiddle as
she mingles, chiming in when she’s lost / a name or time, when she needs a second
opinion / on that Atlantic article she loved so much she couldn’t stop / reading
passages aloud to him. /
His first thought is love; / the second, loss. Overcome with
dread, he weeps and swears / his life for hers, witlessly, over and over again. / Soon
enough he will be pushed back to third, / this child forever her first mate.
Dreams
Each morning he works to remember what dreams / are like, how every once in a
while he’d wake and feel / such a dull ache in his center that it hung around / every
part of his day. He’d catch a glimpse of a boat on the dirt-green Tennessee River, /
hear someone say, Oh, I give up; just tell me what he did next, / be reminded of
his favorite teacher’s death that summer by the scent of Pall Malls, / and he’d be taken
back: water flooding the boat he’s in, / sharks swimming near, but still he refuses to
surface / because it’s just too hard. And then he’s hovering / over his own funeral,
so many empty seats it was easy / to see in the front row his first crush, whose name
/ he saw so often in high school and college that he believed / the world must have
had a plan for them. /
He’s had nothing / like this for a long while. No need to
linger / in fantasy or nightmare when his mind hasn’t taken / all that’s been pent up
in him and turned it / into metaphor. It’s enough to make him think / everything’s
been backwards / because how could a child hurt its mother / even before its first
breath? He’s long expected to feel pain / in dreams, which have always taunted him
/ with what he’d never have, but not in life, which has never cared / to acknowledge
him, one way or the other.
