Lines Overheard from My Wife’s Favorite Podcast
Coffee, trees composing wind, mutilated
corpses telling tales post mortem,
leaving trails akin to Gretel for us
to follow through forever darkened woods,
and moon to glint the knife’s raw edge,
faceless shapes awaiting our trespass,
sacrificial co-ed wielding a life
meant to be lost. Because they knew the victim,
they left her body in the yard for family
to find in the morning. Like the paper,
back when people read such things, I unfold
each day believing stories teach us
ourselves, that what we want to hear must bleed
from who we always were, which begs questions.
Namely, do I know my wife or want to?
And when they lopped off a girl’s hands,
chucked her body down a storm drain,
does the fact that she’s alive today change
how I address my children? The night
one mother died, her daughter took her eyes
and placed them on a shelf of glass horses,
as if models for such wildness made sense,
given context, but how to name the thing
that gave her spoon and will enough to do
what came after? When my boy comes to me,
afraid of what the dark might hide,
how to tell him nothing’s there?
How to lie to him and mean it?
The Tourism of Mass Graves
We admired the smooth grays and whites
of the packet, a single word: Pompeii,
scratched into a corner,
the brochure’s assurance: bilingual guides,
picnic area, and bodies.
You pushed for the deluxe package,
midnight stroll through the Temple of Venus,
its promise of as much as we could take.
I consulted a list of nearby bars.
About the pictures, I felt you quake
at A Quiet Street, as if mall traffic
were unusually light that day,
photographer too used to exposure
for that indie vibe, to help focusing
on what might be an ancient La-Z-Boy
left out after a party. Too many shots
of the Forum, the mountain red
behind columns like spread-apart fingers.
Then, Garden of the Fugitives:
seventeen husks arranged along a wall—
the paste of Italian masters
pumped into voids of ash, limbs, in situ.
The truth is, there are no bodies,
only space for souvenirs, mouths
not choking on debris, but stretched
over their heads like a blank shirt
that, once worn, will never come off.
Tim Payne
Tim Payne currently teaches at The Heritage School in Newnan, GA, where he tries to write as much as he can. He has two boys and a wife, and his poems are mostly about his life, so his poems are mostly about them.
Header image by Ilya Semenov
