I Could Call You Worse Things

It’s the implications when she says his name that he doesn’t like. Coal miner: covered in soot, bent at the joints,

toothless, hillbilly. Never gonna amount to a single damn thing without a degree, her coal-shoveling sugar daddy that pays the bills

while his wife blows twenties and other men. He believes it after hours in the dark, wary of rock fall and loose women that laugh

in the tunnels and run their nails up someone else’s back. Could be how empty the house feels and what or who

his wife spends her time with, the taste of wine on her lips, how cold it feels for him to be the sober one at two in the morning,

wondering who else has sampled from the woman he married, and he can see the fingerprints against her skin,

how they run under the hem of her shirt and disappear to God knows where. Sometimes she pretends to feel them

to piss him off. She gives them names he’d recognize, and says why not? find someone that treats her right when they

are in the heat of their worst fights. He goes to the coal mines, and she is equally trapped at home, pressed between the four walls

he pays for, where she is just a fixture and any moment the roof could cave in, brick and cement toppling until she is smothered.