Reflection on First Season of a Marriage
Never get a husband. They never will make cheese plates without a fuss. Get a dog with thumbs. Sometimes when my husband does the dishes, I rampage. I rampage when for some reason the glasses look dirtier than before a washing or I remember a loneliness. I shape that loneliness into a broom. I use it to sweep away happiness, a state that quite often can lead to complacency, and also to fly off the broom’s handle inside me. We maybe all are holograms, a reputable scientific journal proclaims, and I tell the husband so after dinner. But why does this particular projection have small consciousness that wishes to sit in a straight-backed chair and recall reciting “Friends, Romans, countrymen” in high school and this little hologram goes to market and this little hologram hits zero stoplights all the way home? Also, as a projection, I wonder at my own need to touch. Is light drawn to light? Desire light? Why should this little light become inconsolable over the silliest— Oh, why is there so much of me in me? Maybe this is easy science: Each hologram an imagining light thought to construct, in which one furry projection drinks from the toilet, one projection sprouts leaves that fall annually and never improves at leaf-retention, and my husband— an invisible who may not exist in the kitchen behind me if it weren’t for his singing.
Copyright © 2015 Lindsey D. Alexander. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Spring/Summer 2014. Used with permission of the author.