Tonight your ghost will ask my ghost...

...where is the love?

.
I Was a Young Wife, I Was a Young Mother

There are sixteen of them: inside
the seventh and wrapped around

the eighth, I keep the post-its he
wrote his vows on, even though

at the altar his nineteen year old
nerves took over and his declaration

of love started and ended with shit
girl, you know I won't let you down.

Where Teddy Ruxpin's tape deck
once kept his stories of discovering

Grundo with Grubby, I keep home
video cassettes: reels of the dance

indigenous only to her eight-month
old bones that she kicked and shook

as her first teeth jack-hammered
their way into her head; reels we'd

labeled To Be Watched with Baby's
First Date. In the hollowed handle

bars of his Y-Foil still chained
to the fence in the backyard, I keep

a collage, ransom-note-arranged
headlines of Young Wife Becomes

Young Widow; Twenty-Year-Old
Woman Buries Infant Daughter.

Poorly pixelated black and white
photographs of police and caution

tape and tarped mounds amid
a wasteland of steel and glass

along the 500 block of East
Jefferson Avenue: Small

Town Serenity Rocked By
Raid on Drug Ring: Father

and Daughter's Walk Ended
by Speeding Getaway Car.

In bottles lining shelves lining
the attic walls: things I don't

want to forget: the smell of my
husband's skin after ten hours

sweating with tar and gravel;
the taste of our baby's sleepless

nights and the terror of her first
silent one; the sound of her laugh

with the sound of his mouth
blowing raspberries on the rolls

of her fat little legs; the feel of his
wedding band through the sheets.

In the black ink above my left
breast: two cat claw scratches,

one inscribed 1/19/82-5/28/04,
the other 9/2/03-5/28/04.

In going back to the wild patch
of blackberries across from our

home, taking them seventy-nine
miles away to my home to bake

a pie that I will eat in one sitting,
sitting on the floor so that I am

not so far from the ground
that holds the bodies of the ones

I need.
And now you think

you know me. But you only
know where I keep my love.
.
.