Poetry By
Judith Skillman
Published on: 3/8/2014
Skunked
It will happen to you as well. When the window's open, the fan sucking air from a swath of wetland. Before the ink has dried on the contract for a house you decide to buy, it will occur to you you've been had. The upstairs floor creaks. There's always a man upstairs, something to do with numbers and spectra. Minute differences between this and that. From the argument of scents a yellow cloud wafts. The wasp hotel's full now, and each type of meat attracting more tuxedos. Even a bit of cheese dropped from a sandwich, or a star falling to earth, burning up in its own white streak. The space station on time, magnitude far brighter than Venus. It has to happen several times in one lifetime-- the embarrassment of public speaking, preceded or followed by insomnia. What else has been waiting at the peripheries of the season: accident, mislaid glasses, girl who sat on a bee while recovering from rheumatic fever? It will happen that someone who loved you becomes a millionaire, and you— the friend of his ex-wife— must spend time listening to trains, hearing that plaintive wail of those who once traveled from east to west. You must sit alone with the stink and blush of remembrance, in the stammer of household names, loading the separate compartments for spoon, fork, and knife.
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