Marshmallow Fluff

A lifetime of owning two electronic bathroom scales
and never knowing which one is more honest.

Ankle-high water on a pavement beach in August,
trying to recall whether your toes were painted,
and whether not painting them
could have been enough to not receive a call back.

The remodeled church basement, opening reception.
A foosball table not yet put together.
The tiny men on sticks,
the only ones at the whim of your wrist.

Dad somewhere to the left
of where you need him to be,
stumbling into the windy arms
of early spring soccer matches,
ears aching, skin sunburn-red
from the violent air.

Counting backstrokes,
trusting your fingers,
still startled
when you hit the wall anyway.

At the dinner table, Italian men discuss All Saints's Day.
How they ate sparrows.
They pour Chambord for us ladies,
the glass sweating pink in my hand.

I pull at my sleeve and ask,
Why would someone make a sweater with short sleeves?
Your mom says, It's a feminine cut,
and lifts her glass.

The men describe the nets strung in trees,
the shaking, the small warm weight of them.
Illegal now — but many still do it, they say,
like a door left open.

Thomas passed away in April of 2021, about three months after I wrote this. We had been broken up for almost a year, but I don't think that changed what he was to me. I'm grateful I wrote it when I did, when everything was still close enough to touch. For TGSH.

January 11th

The neighborhood was beautiful and old, the kind that gets subjected to revitalization, new paint and pointed brickwork, repointed stoops. His mother's house was one of the only ones left with an overgrown lawn and cracked cement stairs. It was the end of summer and his skin was lobster red. Someone on his block was growing chili peppers in an unfenced front yard garden, the casual generosity of it, or maybe not generosity at all, just indifference, which is sometimes better.

I don't remember if there was a sign. It wouldn't have mattered. The summer before he'd stolen a Tiffany lamp off someone's porch for me and carried it six blocks without once looking behind him to see if anyone was coming.

I picked one from the branch. He paced behind me and picked another. They're probably not even that hot, he said. His last name rhymes with devil.

Three minutes later we were running. His legs were longer and he had thirty fewer pounds on him and he didn't look back once after he started. I chased after him for a block before my knees gave out, even at seventeen they were unreliable that way, and then I walked the rest of it alone, mouth on fire. When I got to his house he was on the couch his mother had found on the side of the road, drinking cold milk, a few Pringles in his lap. His face was so red it had defeated his sunburn. He barely acknowledged me.

I went to the fridge and drank from the jug and lay down on the cool tile floor and looked at the ceiling. The oven clock said 4:15. His mother would be home from work soon.

A month later a magazine showed up at my house, one of those that just arrives, no subscription. Inside there was a full page ad with dozens of small chili peppers printed across it.

I cut them all out and put them in a long envelope and mailed them to his address even though I was going to see him that night.

He told me a week later it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. I believed him. I still do.