After She Totals Her Car

I.

Firefighters use cutters to hack through
the Isuzu Trooper, a newly wrought
sculptor of bent metal interspersed
with broken glass, extract her battered
body from the car, but can’t rouse her.

II.

She’s in a coma the voice meekly declares,
you drive to the hospital, dabbing tears
as the wipers clear the windshield of rain,
she is in a hospital bed, her eyes closed
and lips parted, her mouth a cave, tongue
dormant, teeth collecting cobwebs of saliva.

III.

Days later you visit again, study her greasy
hair, squeeze her curled hand, notify the nurse
that her adult diaper needs to be changed, try
to console her mother in the unending hallway,
her eyes as gray and flat as the February sky.

IV.

She’s coming out of it, you imagine a stirring
foot, a twitching finger, a guttural noise, fluttering
eyelids, imagine her emerging from a chrysalis
of sorts, her green eyes taking in her recently
rendered body of varying black and blues, airbag
burns, stitches, and scar tissue for the very first time.

- Corey Cook

(added 12.01.08)

The Kleenex Holder

Adele Sutton perches in her chair as she knits a pair of mittens for a needy
family out on Miller Pond Road, her flared glasses roosting on the end

of her narrow nose. Delwin, Adele’s husband, is either napping behind
or reading the Valley News in his leather recliner. A decoupaged Kleenex

holder nests on the old woman’s end table beside a clutch of snow globes,
a gift from Kitty, her best friend since grammar school, acquired after

Adele gushed over Kitty’s decoupaged furniture at the Holiday Bazaar
a month ago. Adele finishes knitting a row, sets her needles down, and studies

the glossy masterpiece. To the left of some flitting birds she spots a familiar
face peeking through a patch of tulips, the face of her first husband, Stewart,

who was killed in an accident at the Strafford Copper Mine, a man Delwin
didn’t acknowledge and didn’t discuss. Adele smiles and then begins crying,

sniffling. Delwin lowers the newspaper and asks, What are you pouting about?
Oh, I’m just thinking of that poor family on Miller Pond Road she whimpers.

- Corey Cook

(added 12.01.08)

Pompanoosuc River

That sultry spring of our seventh grade year
we refused to run laps in gym class and rolled

around on the ground instead – the spongy
earth soothing our scorching skin. That spring
we played tennis in our snowsuits out of boredom –

people in t-shirts and shorts staring, shaking
their heads. That spring we scribbled and passed

notes about who kissed who in the closet of our
classroom on graph paper during Math class,
our bespectacled teacher clueless, in need of a new

prescription. That spring we swam in the river
with her and her friends, her in a sleek black bathing

suit that glistened in the hazy light. That spring one
of her straps slipped from her shoulder, revealing
a dollop of breast, a puckered nipple. That spring

the Pompanoosuc River concealed, but did little
to douse the flaring up of this boy’s swim trunks.

- Corey Cook

(added 12.01.08)