The children we won’t have
I wake at 3:00 a.m. and fry
two eggs until they burn.
My husband sleeps upstairs.
He used to photograph my eyelids,
knuckles, fine bones of my pelvis.
I eat the eggs standing.
The kitchen counter is an open
ribcage, the under-sink piping
exposed. I’ve had so many
small pains lately – in my temples,
wandering my stomach.
My husband used to rest his hands
on my abdomen. We used to whisper
about children, later.
The flash of his camera
bleached everything
dancing white.
I sucked that other man’s cock
so many times, I don’t even remember.
Last week a circuit blew
and the house went dark.
My husband tore out the counter
with a crowbar
while I held the flashlight.
When the sun finally rises
the kitchen drips
like the yolk of an egg.
How my life compares to that of Bonnie Parker
Unlike Bonnie Parker, I never
made love to Clyde Barrow.
Never lived in Texas.
Kissed many men
but never loved most of them.
I could have died at 23 because of the intensity
of life, but unlike Bonnie
I never gave in to that feeling.
Like Bonnie Parker, I limp.
Her Ford V-8 crashed over the guardrail, poured
battery acid across her lap, ate her thigh
to the bone.
I pulled a tendon running.
I’ve never crashed a car but
there’s always tomorrow.
Like Bonnie Parker, men call me cute.
She and I – we know what it’s like to roll
up at a motor court, farmhouse
la-dee-da and how-dee-do.
Unlike Bonnie, I never play
with the motor court children.
But I too could turn tricks if I had to.
I too am a poet, an accomplice
to prison break.
My husband and I played We both go down together
at our wedding. Unlike Bonnie, I never
lived up to that sentiment.
I like to believe Bonnie
and Clyde died synchronously
but the chances of simultaneous
heart failure are slim
as my own experience has taught me.
Bob Lucy’s apple juice
Dad’s childhood friend concocts the Platonic Form
of apple juice – home-pressed, unsullied by sugar
or the grit of reality. After the funeral,
he delivers a bottle daily.
The jugs stand ochre-gold at the front of the fridge.
My sisters and I wander in and out of the kitchen.
We open and close all the doors in the house.
We fold and unfold the laundry,
vacuum half the living room.
We swallow one frothing mugful
of apple juice after another –
bent over the sink, barefoot in the yard,
juice spilling down our chins.
Five nights out of seven, I wake in a sweat
until I stumble into the kitchen and baptize
my throat with juice.
Dad and I sit on the porch.
We pass the bottle, referring to it always
thus – as Bob Lucy’s apple juice –
a balm and an honorific.
An evening with Messier 13
Dad tells me about globular clusters – clouds of stars
bonded by gravity or some other force.
I think he’s joking at first – what a silly name.
We drink apple juice on the front porch.
Only mine contains gin, so I play it cool.
Every physicist in the world, Dad bemoans,
wants to stick their fingers in globular cluster research.
The grants will run out. He’s concerned
about the economics of the field – come on.
I swill warm juice between my molars.
I want to make this cup last.
Dad feeds his ice cubes to the railing wisteria
and pours himself another mugful.
Why do we put such stock in gravity anyway
when it’s only one force among many?
What about the strong nuclear force?
Electromagnetism? Even the weak nuclear force
has more mathematical potency than gravity.
Globular clusters are the oldest points of galaxies,
ten billion years and counting. The Milky Way alone
boasts two hundred clusters or more.
Dad taps the arm of his lawn chair, his eyes
on the wisteria, the driveway, the Toyota Matrix
he and Mom have shared for ten years.
I’m counting the pumps of blood in my wrist.
A single globular cluster contains a million stars,
pinwheeling through the halo arms of galaxies.
I love the sound of this, like sequins
in a saltshaker. We stay on the porch
until my bladder is ready to explode and Messier 13,
the closest of our globular neighbours,
blinks on in the constellation Hercules.
Dad touches my elbow to show me.
Tri tri try
Trigonometry used to be my favourite
because of the hard, sharp lines.
Ever since adultery crashed the equation
my marriage has become a delicate
distended thing. Imaginary
numbers and all that.
I drive to the coast. The mountains
form triangles, criangles. I’m crinkled
and trying, crying.
If I were a triangle, who would I be?
Isosceles? Scalene? Don’t you think
equilaterals are a little too perfect?
Animal, vegetable, mineral. Where
do I sit on the food triangle?
Swallow me – fuck it.
Dark-eyed juncos hop on three legs.
Ptarmigans tilt on three wings.
I am three grey feathers
glued to the windshield.
Dad’s an electrical engineer, mathematician.
He took me and my sisters to church
three times a month.
Is morality solid,
liquid, or gas? What’s the difference
between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?
Triumvirates and trivialities
are drinking me down.
Angles and angles and all that shit.
You could be right or you could
be wrong. I stopped loving
trigonometry after the affair.
Dad cried on the phone when I told him.
Why can’t we all be three-toed
woodpeckers and leave it at that?
*****
Danielle Hubbard lives in Kelowna, BC, where she works as the CEO of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in CV2, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and Geist, among other places. When not writing or working, Danielle spends most of her time swimming and cycling.
