This Is What It Means To Eat Dinner Alone

Melissa Barrett-Traister, December 2011
First Place Poetry

In the winter
the wren becomes a refugee
inside the spine of a cactus bent like scoliosis,
and the air smells like dust.

I know this much:
Winter is a demand for rest.

But, for me, there is no stillness
in the same burnt orange sheets
where we last harvested our thanks
for one giving way to find the other.

From this house where we lived, back-to-back,
like days on a calendar for a year,
how each morning resembled a pair of bodies
pulled from bed at six-thirty in the morning,
to the swish of pant legs and jingle jangle of door keys
fastening the evening.

What I remember most
is mixing ingredients in the kitchen to
to nurture what sifted between us,
as he exchanged incomplete sentences with a television set,
about carpe diem and funding for arts education.

When I finished decorating our plates with swirls of food like a Klimt painting,
he’d cut into the skin of an orange and smile.
Then, pulling his body from the couch like a label from a jar, he’d say:
Do you ever wonder if
our love will burn like the sun? 

Now there is
a dry spring of marigolds
in the backyard of a desert home
where I still prepare a meal for two people.
My plate holds half an artichoke heart.
On the same yellow plate where he felt the sun
is the single smudge of a fingerprint as if to say:
I’ve burnt straight through you.