Long after mother had said
“goodbye” to her piano,
Dad — dead drunk,
broke her mandolin.
In tears,
she picked it up
off the kitchen floor,
its neck broken
and held by the strings
like a limp
dinner chicken.
I hated hating him.
When he died
I cried,
relieved.
That monster:
even the whiskey
I guzzled
couldn’t keep him
from trying
to be reborn
inside me.
I’m almost well now.
In the garden
you see me through a window
and wave.
I’m under a big straw hat
and you think I’m digging holes
for tulips.
But, like a gopher,
I’m checking for softness
in the ground,
a final resting place
to bury the memory of
his grinning skull:
the last goodbye I got
when I found him,
staring at
a black and white test pattern
on the Zenith TV.
Last night,
you asked me what I was most
afraid of…
I lied and said it was
a fear of big words.
“Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia?”
you asked,
sounding out every vowel.
That’s right,
‘only Hemingway for me,’
you fuck-face,
I thought to myself,
smiling like a China doll
and nodding mechanically.
