Back Home

It begins with a lie, a lie of love. Back home,

there’s Church and heat and brisket and a woman

who waits for her husband on the front porch. I know

that woman because I know her husband—

I slept with him two Saturdays ago,

in a cabin by a creek miles away from her watery eyes.

I can still remember the feel of his hair beneath my lips,

the way that I was so close to him I could see

the specks of gray his hair dye refused to hide.

It’s a moral thing, I suppose.

Perhaps the dye is more honest than me. But back home,

where Tennessee suburbia stretches out like death across overcut grass,

we’re separated. I’m only permitted to watch him over the angles of

a white picket fence, watch him sip his beer and pet his dog and

act the way a man should act,

in his little town with his little church and his little wife

that I could not hate, no matter how hard I bit my tongue

for her. I’d watch and I’d think how fixed it all was,

how unnatural,

with me and him separated

by houses and pews and prenups

and all sorts of other made-up things

that I knew Mother Nature would never feel bothered

to weep and make rain for.