Maroon Recliner

             —after Maxine Kumin’s “How it is”

I think of the phone call,

honey, how I would let it ring,

the voices mute, the crying left unheard

back from the violent thunder of the shot

back down to the garden, your pleading hands lowered

picking petals from a white gardenia

dropping them in a fragrant flag of surrender,

looking back to the beginning, where all we knew

gathered, a Sunday dinner

with fried chicken and iced tea, our love like a tearful prayer.

A year and a half after your death I sink into your maroon recliner.

The right armrest is thread worn.  Under the cushion, a piece

of wire and a milk chocolate wrapper from a birthday

long passed.  My body slips into the edges of your chair.

My husband you have aroused in me

the need for love.  I whimper—

a puddle, a rock thrown, my reflection broken.

It will take years to capture the snapshots of our memory,

my heart, an envelope,

a tearing from the diary of a spirit.

As You Will Be

Celebrating our anniversary this week has 

me curious, who were you before we were married?

I know the stories

but what about the ones left out—

the version that only echoes in the space

of wordless translation, a drying ghost.

I bet you were the type that swayed to loud music

in fresh air venues,

smoking pot with bare feet and stringy hair

your scent like a tree or the last autumn camp fire;

listening to hallucinating drum beats,

taking you farther from where you ever thought you would be.

Or were you a celebrity

glowing with the flush of youth

neat curls of gel-licked hair like the Italian lover

who is fashionably flashy,

a new swanky woman on your arm

with every dinner?  Did you charm,

were you sultry and suave?

The distant past before the vows

is now the present.  And it has come to me.

I want to claim my solemn promise.

I want to explore your past
comb the clues you left for your future self,

learn your face, your mysteries,

because the original sin is

in loving a stranger.

Bio: Rachel Fogarty is an undergraduate student at USF where she is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing.  She lives in Brooksville, Florida with her husband and their two children.