5
The old lady is understanding.
Her dearest-sweetest only son Joey is in prison for life,
having slit the throats of seven victims in two years,
keeping their tanned skin in an old chest
that had been his mother’s dowry.
She loved him anyway, knew how people’s minds could slip into knots
with the knocks and kicks of being
and her neighbor,
sad drunken girl,
herself a lost mind
makes this sort of spectacle almost everyday after The Price is Right
when the old lady is
bored and raking what few leaves in the yard have
settled in the course of twenty four hours
before it is time to start dinner,
which is poultry on Mondays and Wednesdays, pork on Tuesdays, Thursdays were beef, fish (of course) on Fridays, Saturday they usually went out and Sunday was whatever they could find in the fridge.
The old lady’s husband is a rigid man and she always prefered variety.
This system is a compromise spurned from
some forgettable argument
over what was for dinner
about thirty years ago,
the kind of spat that is foundationless and more a question of will than of truth.