Handkerchiefs
I hate your handkerchiefs.
Like my grief, I resist touching the crumpled white squares
piling up on your nightstand.
I loath them, and seize the smallest part I can manage, pinching each by a corner,
I heave them toward the laundry basket one at a time as if they might be harboring a small pox epidemic.
When they come out of the wash
stains set within the fibers, I resent them even more.
I know —
they will never come clean again
I’m certain folding them is a waste of time. Instead
I want to stuff them into a corner of
your dresser drawer, defiantly
mash them together in a wrinkled mess
so you might notice how I feel inside,
like a balled up handkerchief stained with
impenetrable sadness.
Maybe I’ll throw them all away, force you
to use boxed tissue
like the rest of the civilized world,
at least those of us
who aren’t hooked on Fox News
with a gullible ignorance
that makes uttering
common sense sound profane.
I would deny doing it too,
let you think they’d been stolen
like the years
denied your wife
by your overbearing
opinions, denial and selfishness.
I hate your handkerchiefs,
deceptively neat white squares of cloth
laced with germs
lying haphazard by your bed,
in your pockets
soiled by tears of grief mixed with years
of sticky regrets
coughing and sputtering for relief
through every COPD jag, and yet
Like you, I
wonder where
our next breath will come from
now that she is gone.
