Ally Malinenko : Three Poems
Better Than the Last
There was so much I wanted to say last night
while you were making dinner,
cutting the chicken in perfect little squares
about it not being sadness or grief
that took 7 years to get past
but anger.
Raw, perfect, gleaming anger.
The kind of anger that harvests your lungs
so that it takes the breath out of you.
The kind of anger that spreads like the cancer
that killed her, eating each cell like little gumdrops.
Anger like a little cartoon monster that sits in the corner
of my bedroom and feasts on my eyelids keeping me up
at 3 am to think, too much, about motherless girls.It’s also the kind of anger that when it leaves you,
because you can’t leave it,
you feel it brush past your cheek
a rush of blood,
that makes you dizzy
and then the loss.
It may have only been a ball of furious screaming
but it was yours.
And with it gone, you are lighter.
Softer.But last night, when I wanted to tell you,
the words stuck,
like the anger used to
and then the song on the radio switched
and you said it was your favorite and it was mine too
and the moment passed.Even later when I scribbled a few of these words
on a receipt
and showed it to you, like a child with a prize,
you nodded and smiled. I poured us some more wine for dinner.
And we let that anniversary pass, like so many others should have.