C28
Public Record
Excerpt from novel: Best Cellar

I read your obituary at the twenty-year reunion,

on a cork-board by the punch and the liquor.
I cried and cried and asked everyone there about you,
how it happened and all that.
I asked if anyone had spoken to you recently
but you had been dead five years already so nobody had.
You were survived by your loving husband Warren and two sons,
Timothy and Jonathan, it said. You spelled it just like I do, too.
You could have named him
Johnathon
if you were just naming him
Johnathon,
but you gave him my name.
My heart was train brakes before the crash.
I took the top shelf brandy to the football field
to lie down with the Dippers.
The air was all ice and bee stings
so I downed the bottle for warmth
and woke up in puke.
It was four in the morning when I woke up,
and I saw the Dippers and I was out there looking down on us.
I went to hold you tighter and just rolled my arm through some vomit.
Driving home with my head feeling like a medicine ball,
all I thought about was how badly I wished I had stayed with you.

I wore that cologne you liked.
The one I wore when we were kids
and the one I wore to the ten-year reunion.
My wife must have smelled you on my shirts then,
through all the booze and cigar smoke,
but she never asked.
We should have just run then, Rose, you and me.
I wouldn't be stuck here holed-up in a dusty study
with a corpse for a kid and the good car gone for good.
We could have made it, the two of us.
I'd make sure to check for asbestos before we moved into any place,
unlike that jackass husband of yours.
I should have asked you at the ten-year
about all those naive things you said when you were young.
I should have asked you but I didn't care then.
Life was in full swing and I was making love with you.
None of that stuff mattered then.
We were still young.
We were still "at least we're not thirty” then.

Thresher Charles