Our apartment still aromatic with the trout lily
I woke the morning after our anniversary
to learn he’d spent the night ill without me.I couldn’t help but blame our wedding cake,
its sugar & buttercream,
which I’d thawed from the freezer
& divided down the middle.The cake tasted nothing
like it had at our wedding, but he still cleaned
both plates & got food poisoning.Listen, when I talk about that cake, I am talking about
how in the months that followed, crows replaced
the barn swallows. How one day while jogging
I watched a hawk tear open a rabbit.Sometimes the old shame rises
& I am reminded of the years I went missingin a stranger’s body.
One night, a storm shook entire branches
from the oak across the street.
When he asked how it was possiblethe noise hadn’t woken me, I reminded him
what he himself had said. I sleep like the dead.
Our apartment still aromatic with the trout lily by Theodora Ziolkowski
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks (TRP: The University Press of SHSH), winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Ghostlit (TRP), a collection of poems. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, The Normal School, Short Fiction (England), The Seventh Wave, Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in Kearney, Nebraska, where she teaches creative writing as an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Read more at theodoraziolkowski.com