Last night I slept in the yard again, bedded in unmowed fescue and clover. I covered myself in a blanket of black walnuts. In the violet before dawn, I wake guilt-fucked and gutted by a half-grief I cannot taste. The forecast calls for a high of fifty-six, a sprinkle of wet ashes. I stand on the blacktop and hold my tongue toward the sky. Heartbreak is heartbreak. I tell this to the thirteen-year old boy who tripped halfway to the finish line and didn’t make State. I tell this to the fifteen-year-old girl in the passenger seat when her mother comes down with cancer. Sounds like an age-appropriate translation— Shit happens, kid, or It is what it is— but if I repeat it enough, it might become true to my twelve-year old self, the one I talk to when animals die or movies turn sad, the one I promised to cover with my adult body the next time the woman we married shreds our love letters or throws her wedding band into the street. At night I rub twenty-one years of love into her calves, while I wonder about the other woman I could’ve loved who only remembers me as a boy I’ll never be again. The heat was oppressive this summer. Spider ash killed the roses in her flower beds. She decided not to plant a vegetable garden. I cannot say what I want to say, so I paint desire onto a canvas and cover it with something warm and luminescent. Autumn arrives. I light a cigarette because the needs of the beloved are great and the doctor says my lungs are clear and who wants to live forever, anyway?
That spring morning early in the pandemic she caught our Bluetick Coonhound with a robin’s nest— two hatchlings already a tooth-mauled meal, one blind baby bird holding to the earth. Three nights she kept it in a box on the nightstand, woke the odd hours, gave the eager throat baby food in careful drips from a dropper, until the third day we rose to find its stillness, cold and wrinkled. That was three years ago. Tonight, she dreams of giving birth again. The flush of new love from the infant scent followed by my absence of desire. In sleep her skin seeks warmth against my skin. I pull her body against mine, remembering the tufted sky of that day, how it fell to me to wrap the limp and featherless thing in a towel and bury it between the roots of a walnut tree.
after Maggie Smith the way she loved the lamp I broke, the one adorned with birds (she adores birds), the one I dropped against ancient hardwoods while wiping the kitchen counter ahead of her return from the grocery. When I glued the severed pieces back into place, they dried and set before her arrival. She pretended not to notice the distorted tail feathers, the disfigured head, cocked sideways and levered by the bulge of hardened glue, or the serpentine cracks along the wings— all reminders of my clumsy deceit she kept on display in the living room. She’s not one to throw away a broken lamp. Still, we never spoke about the crooked pieces.
Ben Weakley spent fourteen years in the U.S. Army, beginning with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and finishing at a desk inside the Pentagon. His work appears in the anthology Our Best War Stories by Middle West Press. Other poems appear or are forthcoming in The Line, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Black Moon Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and Vita Brevis, among other publications. His poetry won first prize in the 2021 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards and first place in the 2019 Heroes’ Voices National Poetry Contest. Ben lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their children, and a red-tick hound named Camo.
