by Allison Renner
My Middle
Honey, I have to watch my middle,
my wife said, night shirt pulled up,
toothbrush like a broken diving board
dangling from her mouth.
Me, I’m experimenting with forgetting how I look.
I haven’t caught my eyes in the rearview for months,
maybe years. There are summers I can’t remember
shirtless and free. The edge of the cuesta approaches.
The mountainside, the riverbank, the road shoulder-
they too suffer the escarpment blues.
I’ve studied barn owl and blue Jay. They know anger.
Uncle Phil was a nuthatch. The southern live oak
with its flexing arms wandering is
as wide as it is tall but it’s roots broke into
a neighbor’s basement five foundations down.
Autographs of who was here and who loves who
scar the leaves and bark as if nature gave a shit,
as if trees weren’t already sacrificed to record our every misdeed,
as if we had any more need for the persistence of ownership.
The fast food franchise up the avenue survived six owners
and the executives as many layoffs.
Ant colonies trade queens, shuffle empires.
The link? The cartons and cups and crumbs under
the passenger seat left by me or the kids, I can’t remember,
and the line of worker ants up the tire and
under the slammed door of the Dodge Caravan,
school children to the cafeteria, a few loose ones
biting my ankles as I drive this country road,
the branches old lovers embracing across
the dappled pavement, leaves waving as I pass.
There was plastic in the fish sandwich and we ate it anyway-
another jumble of shame and truth in the great jumbling
and it all ends each night with one final wild thought
we’ll never remember; a dream-leak before the flood,
a release of worry that insists sleep.
Dustin King would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When that isn’t an option, he teaches Spanish and runs a small organization that provides aid to the undocumented community in Richmond, Va. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ligeia, Tilted House, South Broadway Review, Autofocus Lit, and other journals.
Allison Renner is an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine and the Publicity & Reviews Manager for Split/Lip Press. Her fiction and photography has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Daily Drunk, Six Sentences, Rejection Letters, Versification, Thimble Literary Magazine, and vulnerary magazine. She can be found online at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Twitter @AllisonRWrites.