Jennifer Clark
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The Word Whoreder
She tells the psychiatrist she isn’t sure how
it got this way, that maybe it was her
father’s fault that she played with
plebeians then shoved them under sofa cushions,
slipped somnolent and sully under the mattress
stashed miserly and magnitude in the sugar jar.
.
It began slowly, content just to
spend quiet evenings at home with laconic
and laissez-faire. But then her father died,
and within days she brought home
obstreperous, loquacious, and
alacrity—partied with them for weeks
before she realized loquacious
had pushed laconic and laissez-faire
out the door. Inchoation slips out
from under her tongue—she acknowledges
it’s gotten out of hand. It’s not easy living
like this, she says standing before stacks
of hubris towering in front of the fireplace;
she can’t even brush her teeth without stumbling
over garrulous piles of you-name-it.
She weaves her way
like a drunken mouse
gnawing through a
cache of wanton words—
dingy, salacious, crapulence—
all hailing down upon her,
admits she can’t stop,
tastes shrink in her mouth,
purrs, I want even you.
In The Downpour of Your Absence
u y o u
o
Y
O
U
You
were my roof.
So, when you up and left
me and the kids without even leaving
so much as a shingle, I’d lay awake at night,
missing the gentle slope of you, bared to the naked
sky, nothing to stop me now from touching the burning stars,
yanking them down, crushing them like ice between my teeth. The impossible
was here. In exposing the rooms of us to the elements of ancient moon and dust
you flung open
a widow and
everything night rushed into me and spilled upon the children.
Dusk poured into your cereal bowl that sat on the counter —
shadows sloshed into the entryway where your boots leaned
against themselves. Everything day
seared us. We baked in memory. Your hat hung on the
hook where you last left it—reminding
us of the bigger brim of you. It became dangerous to walk
floors slick with heaven’s clutter. The kids began resenting
the daily chore of raking leaves that crumbled like broken fists
upon the kitchen table. Then
winter arrived and for weeks at a times
we couldn’t find each other. I dug a path to the door,
the kids helped me. You would have been proud
of them. They worked really hard. Eventually,
we
had
to
move on.
"In the Downpour of Your Absence" first appeared in Midwest Quarterly Review.
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Jennifer Clark lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her first book of poems, Necessary Clearings, will be published by Shabda Press in 2014. Failbetter, Main Street Rag, and Pear Noir are a few of the places that have made a home for her writings. Mostly recently, her short story published in Fiction Fix received their Editor’s Choice Award.