He’s taking two suits to the cleaners. The first
is red where the wide-hipped woman knocked his palm and the way she
swabbed it, inches from his crotch. The second stain’s harder to
clean. It smells of six months in the nut house, where the manic-depressive
in the bed next to his always had a magic marker in his one happy hand.
Sometimes, at night, he steals away from his wife and walks the line.
Following the veins in his wrist back to his grandmother who shaves
her head for fear of the communists, an uncle strumming the guitar with
dentures, and his sister, dead at seventeen in a jackhammer accident.
He doesn’t like to remember the way to the brook, where ducks deliver
monologues to all the insomniacs. And now he’s balding. Filling
out two tickets. Pushing receipts in the overhead flap. Turning his
old clothes over.