Terminal Husband and Wife
It’s a sad diagnosis:
Marriage.
But I’ve accepted it,
and now, swollen with child,
the only comfortable
clothes in the house
are his: t-shirts and boxers
the wife before me surely washed,
pulled off of his body.
Here, in the drawer of my life,
I reach for the blue plaid
of his past, pull them on,
exhausted from exertion,
and leave a slip of paper
in their place, a prescription
for an ailment
that must be filled
and filled again.
~
Dominique Traverse Locke is an educator and writer from southwest Virginia. Her poems have appeared in The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and other regional journals, as well as in print and online in various other publications. Dominique has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two of her poetry collections have been published.
~
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