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.