Wedded, at Last, to the Idea of Weeds

Rosanne Singer

Sunny days I pruned words from your list of favorites. 

Bed sheets screened my fantasies of someone else. 

I held up a picture, This is what I want our house 

to look like. Spare beauty you couldn’t do. Excising 

was my exercise. One evening you left me home sick 

with the flu. You spread the map and went there. 

That time you didn’t want to stay married I said

I wish you were dead. In my nightmares you played

the brick wall, I acted Humpty Dumpty. You planted 

tomatoes, sprawling beds of uncontested ground. 

Years plumped us, watered the wither. Words overran 

their borders. A tornado carried off the roof, 

records drowned. We held hands under the gape, 

relocated our hurt. We watched a coffin lowered

into the ground, threw fists of dirt. In the rain

you steadied more than half the umbrella 

over my head. We conjugated the same verb. 

I do, he does, we did.