Comet

Image © 2013 Jennifer Wagner

She grew up in Nixa,

barefoot, hay in her hair,

with a penchant for buttermilk

and married men.

Now I ain’t excusin’ nobody,

ain't judgin’neither,

just tellin’ it how it was

there in the sweltering heat of a late-July June.

She drove a charcoal-painted Mercury Comet

with a side window

busted out.  Never fixed it,

said it was because she liked the sound

of the thunder rain coming through,

like horse hooves,

at full gallop.

A tube of lipstick in a gaudy orange-pink shade,

rolled around on the dash,

its contents melting in the sizzling sun.

One time, as I sat shotgun and bumping along dirt roads,

the smell of the sweet, warm earth in our noses,

I asked her why she kept it there—

the rattle of it being a continual poke to the nerves.

She said it was on account of how it reminded her

of the dog who’d  bitten her and blotted out all her suns.

I always thought it was a joke I never understood,

but would

when I hit that magic year

when things adults said became clear.

She always drove barefoot,

tossing her boots in the backseat,

and pulling her flowered country dress up

while slipping down on the pedals,

a jar of sweet tea between her knees.

The winds of change were coming,

she’d say, and get that far-away look

like she’d seen her last blue Missouri moon.

The day she burned out,

I’d felt it. 

Like being stranded

in a float tube on winter’s river.

She’d gone to Springfield to catch a glimpse of her little boy

playing in someone else’s backyard.

A woman came out and was applying a Band-aid to his knee,

he’d called her ‘Mama’.

And that’s how one word can break your heart.

When we knew she’d met the fate of comets,

I ran to my room to bleed myself onto paper;

to write dreams of life lived violently, cursedly, and then

of green grass and white daisies,

and things that never end.

And to cry.

She’d left the lipstick tube for me,

on my scarred wooden white-painted dresser,

with her empty jar,

and 3 sets of  Newberry’s dime store earrings

in the shape of mini stars, moons, and daisies.

I drank the tea in 3 gulps,

slid the tube in my pocket,

stuck the star-shaped earrings through the holes in my lobes;

and then with all the voice I could muster,

I vowed to keep my sky,

that no dog would blot my suns,

and that he’d have to kill me

before

he could ever take my heart.

Copyright © 2013 Jennifer Wagner