Honeysuckles

He heard that she had drowned,
candles lit, sonata on pause,
soap floating from one end to another, a
vagabond in water.
He knew there wouldn't be anyone
to hear her heeltaps announce
that she had reached the mirror,
then turned to see her hair unravel
like a rope
being thrown
from a window.
He didn't linger; she didn't relax,
but kept shoving the dirt
away from the sucking,
the groans
of some child
bewitched in an underwater cave. . . .
When he took his bath, he read
his wife's letters, telling her
she could do better.
A five-year contract. The university
that kept writing to her
like a boy proposing.
She wouldn't write back,
and so he had to warn her,
tell her that she had to be
the girl with just one wish
because he knew
how men were
with a woman who declared
her birth as Paris.
So when he heard that she had died,
he told those French-speaking morticians
to be ready to call the police
after they had drained her body
and saw that her blood
had been nothing but poison.

Karen Mitchell was born in Columbus, Mississippi. She is the author of The Eating Hill and has published in several magazines.

...