In What We Have Made

The way your signature comes across the paper makes me and the desk attendant smile, both knowing that if you were in fact a doctor it would not be so neat. This clarity of Mrs. and Mrs. Dr. Parker, yes written out for the first time in public, with a little haha lie that I then add to and say, She’s a doctor of anthropology, not a medical doctor, that’s why she has good handwriting, and he laughs and says, I was wondering. An unknown farce being so much of why I have put myself in this room with you, why you have put me in this room with you, holding your bag as you unlock the door and say, stepping in and gesturing with your free hands, I’m not carrying you across the threshold, and I say, That’s for a home not a hotel, and kiss kiss three quick times, sitting on the end of the bed where I watch you in the pieces of your old self slowly unbutton your blouse and show your braless breasts to me, as your puzzle then fits from you to us, and the smell of you pressed against me is once again a revelation. What holds (this) sun sometimes in the way the skin of your name is on my unwashed hands wiped on the end of my stained skirt. In this rattle as I dig up the yard for what will last through a season that comes to ripen (at a moment) that I thankfully cannot see the end of. Another group of holes in the dirt, going off into the distance, we’ll work to fill with laughter and little half hummed songs as the time of our memories erases so many things we do not want to remember. Amplifies, sometimes, so many things we do not want to remember in how we must recover from what has changed in who we have always been (should we get a cat?) with these eyes now, from she, across the table, as the TV goes in the background, eating eggs with too much ketchup, watching with a gaze that can, as we go on with breakfast and our everyday orange juice mouth poems, see what we (even with our good handwriting) may never come to fully understand and then finally, in what we have made, bare it.

Christopher Heffernan

Christopher Heffernan's poetry and fiction have been placed in magazines and journals around the country such as The Believer, The Writer’s Journal, Pacific Coast Journal, Talking River, Toasted Cheese, the South Dakota Review, Louisiana Literature, the Sierra Nevada Review, Whiskey Island, Big Muddy, the Cape Cod Poetry Review, 34th Parallel, and the Madison Review, among others. He has a book of poetry and flash fiction titled Rag Water published by Fly By Night Press and a book of poetry titled (laughter) published by Fomite Press. He spends much of his time working and walking in the sun.