Dialectical Image

My housemates and I were tossing water at one another
from tall glass mugs, when what anyone would think would happen
happened—a Dorito-sized chunk of glass in Abby’s arm.
I was the boyfriend and the soberest (on both counts,
good for me!) and so I drove her to the clinic to get stitches.
It was a small-town clinic, the wait not long. They sewed her up,
and we went home and had some beers. She took her pill.
The local television station flew a blurry stars and stripes.
We got to bed at pretty much our normal time.
Near dawn, I heard a clicking that could only be called awful,
though it took me several minutes to arrive at that conclusion.
It was Abby’s pet rat, whose name I can’t recall,
who had chewed through the screen on the top of her cage
and climbed our loft to gnaw on Abby’s bloody stitches.
Overhearer, I went apeshit—there was nowhere else to go—
but before I did, I remembered that when I was eight years old,
my dad sold our rusted, flagless flagpole to our neighbor,
an old Republican man who’d once shared his dinner with me
while my hippie parents brained each other verbally.



Reprinted from Terminations (Flood, 2023) with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.