The divorce.

The final chapter of our union
tells of bone deep chagrin-
the dumb utter of
‘I feel statements’
plays itself like a mantra,
useless invocations found
in the crumpled leaflets
from the therapist’s office.

The pointed questions
from our guilty mouths
forces a sober thought through;
we felt the cold walk in
but we never felt the warmth walk out.

The silent stare between us
measures the immeasurable,
a gulf of indifference grows-
it’s time to close dead eyes,
and move on from this grave.

A heart.

On a Sunday evening
she noticed mold growing
within the divots and cracks
of this old rotted thing—

plucked from her chest
by her own hand
she buried it in the trash
alongside burnt letters
and bad eggs,
muttering to herself
that it was too rancid
to keep.

Dinner with the folks.

My mother simmers oxtails
and hollers like a kettle—
high blood pressure and anxiety,
nothing is ever good enough,
she fans herself with a dish cloth
while she squawks about ingrates
and too much gristle.
 

Beneath brown eaves
my father smokes in silence,
he watches moss grow over a stone.

Mire.

Drifting morning fog;
rivulets gather and wash
over broken trees.

Retirement.

Tired hands fumble
with the clasp of an old bra—
elm trees groan at night.

Nancy Botta lives just outside Chicago with her husband, son, and a menagerie of tropical fish. A marketing concierge for a multinational conglomerate, Nancy has been publishing poetry in digital forums since the halcyon days of LiveJournal and AOL 4.0. Her most recent works have appeared in WINK: Writers in the Know; Soft Cartel; Three Lines Poetry; Furtive Dalliance; Haiku Journal; and other publications. Find her, and the remainder of her poetry, at https://rustedhoney.com/.

Image by Böhringer friedrich – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2188225