The Last Vestiges (ROUND 5)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about a pocked-marked meth head (eyelashes loaded up on mascara like one of those NASCAR redneck slores) out for cash from her mother, who watches her toddler each day
The Last Vestiges
Happy Meal box battered (fries stiff, having clocked a night’s share of miles), the meth-mouth mom sighs at the door. Into her childhood home she whirlwinds (“Hey my big boy!”), scooping up the TVed toddler in a centrifugal hug. Unlike that pit reek cartoonified by curbside Febreze, that fluttering cheer cartoonified by curbside mascara (and a toke in the mirror) wilts in on itself. More cash must be coaxed out of Granny.
She does that teen sway of one leg behind the other— men, smoking near the car, framed in the bay window. Too fast the day approaches when—against the fixity of that reek, too contagious to stand—the transience of that cheer, no less contagious, will flare so bright that the boy, his fingers fretting the toy’s contours, will understand the necessity of becoming immune to hope at a level of consciousness before his time.
