Mouth Full of Flowers
BY TODD ROBINSON
I’m not the best person in town, or anyone’s favorite, but I came home to Omaha from the farm and never left. My partner didn’t cry at her father’s funeral even though it was snowing on the ancient seabed from which he had coaxed alfalfa to feed all the miserable cows. It was weird to wash the smoke out of his curtains without him there to drink and dance with. It’s been so long since I dropped an ice cube down his shirt, it feels like it never happened. I guess it didn’t, to most people.
So I gushed in my rumpled suit, ancient seas pouring from me for his melodramatic bruises, the way he knew my nickname but not my name, webbed as he was in those intravenous cables he thought were cobwebs. Even as I became a priest of grief, I flayed myself with guilt. It wasn’t my father reduced to a jar’s shape. Memory’s amber: Catholic church stoop—a hearse mouth full of flowers.
The Impossible Future
BY TODD ROBINSON
Something was wrong with the magnolia tree. Its blossoms mocked April drought, bobbed in violent winds as the red flag warning became a tire fire. As I held its lowest branch still, snapped a kaleidoscope against the heaving sky, our dream house kept muscling into frame. Not just the balcony with its rotten water and Dave dead of cancer saying this shit is shit long before now, not just the lumpy bed where we rolled on the rack of grief, her mother / father / brother / gone. Not just the Flexeril and cocaine, our confused capillaries. It was more. I slid my phone into the same pants I’d worn for ten years and fell into the future. When I arrived the front grass was dirt and all the neighbors were strangers, trapped in their pasts but with electric cars to cry around in. I went into the house festooned with juniper pollen and heart failure. It wouldn’t be long. As the rooms unfolded, the plaster walls and walnut woodwork we had worshipped were not my property. I turned off the insulin pump to save myself from hospice, settled into a glitchy wingback. The same old aimlessness! It took hours to remember the Lacanian analyst. He had called me a toddler, dropped his fee to keep me in therapy, let his beard lengthen even as the world grew hotter. “Come on in,” he always said as he opened the door. But here was memory taking the wheel again. I didn’t understand. This was the future, one I’d stepped into so I could be alone with hard candies and cobwebs. All this tenseless time: a Vegas dancefloor faking it, a country church counting sins, this classroom or that with Baudelaire, Sexton, Du Fu. For so long I wept and fasted, wept and prayed that she became a shut-in. Now I’m the last man in this moment, walking away from the magnolia and the shade that watered me.
