Tuesdays You bought sunflower seeds, planted one for each of us. I watched you weed them until they grew four feet. But still you kept trimming, staking, pruning—even when their petals wilted. I don’t answer your calls anymore, and you stopped leaving messages. But today I bought a bundle of sunflowers at the store. (they gave me joy; is that a betrayal?) As I cut them down to the perfect size, tossed out the odious stems, I wondered what you ate for breakfast that morning.
For Ophelias A dress for her, a smile for him. My sadness a soliloquy I sing for them. Was even my vulnerability a performance just for you? So many facades, they form an empty circle.
Motherland You gave me buckets and buckets and I tried to hold it, tried to swim or sail. But all I felt was scrabbling nails, water through my fingers. My hands can’t grasp your hollow heed, can’t return your slippery sadness to your closed arms. I was drowning ‘til I learned to breathe water. And now I can no longer live on land.
Backyards and BBQs I will be 50 years old when I have lived as long without your violence as I have with it. Half a century and only half without your power; I still worry the whole with its consequences. I might have a kid or two. They might be in college or working or have their own kids. And hopefully I will have a backyard. And hopefully it will have no shadows. I think it will be nice to warm my weathered skin by its sun, and think of that kid or two or the dishes that need rinsing or 401ks or inviting the neighbors over for a BBQ. It will be peaceful – and it will only take half a century.
House Guests
It is so crowded—
full of their words,
their silences,
my dusty dreams.
They fight for space,
I concede—
my needs just flinching shadows.
I should’ve outgrown
the domineering guests,
the quiet, destructive ones.
But if I were to kick them
to the curb,
say, “Don’t let the door hit you—”
Will the quiet swallow me?
Or worse—
let me be.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Isabelle Mongeau is a writer and graduate of University of Cambridge, UK, where she received an MA in creative writing. Her writing has won a national short story contest by Living Springs Publishers in 2018, as well as appeared in The Merrimack Review, Cleaver Literary Magazine and Alloy Literary Magazine.
