Another afternoon. The mail, a pile
of credit card offers I rip in two
and dump in the bin. As a child,
I stood at the edge of Lake Michigan
and imagined a future as wide
as those shores. Now, I drive
my old station wagon across town
to my best friend’s house where
there are dishes to wash and
we wash them, fold the small cotton
shirts of her three children, stand
in her dingy kitchen chipping
nail polish off our cuticles, still talking
about the future, all the time
the future. In my own house, the dust
piles up like chalk and I wipe it off
with cheap kleenex. Sometimes
I think about my friend’s baby,
the one that’s dead, buried, a tiny
bundled box of flesh. It’s disgusting,
I know, but I can’t get the smell
of his ears out of my nose, the shiny
crease below the lobe where his
baby-sweat collected, smelling
like milk, earth, parsnips. I live
three thousand miles from his grave,
in a small western state mostly
forgotten by the Union, where I’ve
found a man who drives a diesel truck
as loud as a snowplow. Sometimes
I think it’s what I’ve always wanted.
I still have NPR, can listen about lives
that revolve in bigger circles,
that take place in cities bound up
by record-breaking snowfall
or countries where the elected officials
were actually elected. I can still get
my expensive mascara, though now
I buy it at the mall, my only monthly
purchase large enough it seems silly
to pay with cash. Sometimes
I think that feeling is worth it, laying
the bills on the glass counter, smoothing
the corners, counting what’s mine.