Light No Longer Pulses from You

Abandoned in Gary’s Salvage Yard: My 1966 Nova, purchased by my parents for graduation in 1978, now sans tires, body perched on cement blocks, rusted frame, hood torn from the vehicle, thrown to the side like a dismissed lover. I lean against the passenger door, look through the broken windows, glance at the yellowed foam leaking from seats like teardrops, smoke my last cigarette, bummed from a waitress at The Last Stop Diner down the street. My heart locks up. Fiancé thrown through that windshield a year ago today. I was driving.

a ghost whispers
as wind through tall grass
silence returns

The Wake

On Uncle Robert’s dining room table: turkey on rye, chicken on wheat, loads of potato salad, mac and cheese, green bean casserole. A side table holds pecan pie, chocolate cake, cupcakes, brownies. Ice cream in the freezer. Iced tea and lemonade in glass pitchers, ice melting in the heat. The smell of coffee permeates the air.

A little bourbon, or scotch, tequila, or gin available if you beg Uncle Robert. He stands guard at his liquor cabinet. His brother would have loved this party in his honor. Uncle Robert’s wife shushes me when I call it a party, tells me that’s disrespectful. I’m eight at the time and don’t understand why treats and lots of people laughing and eating isn’t a party.

I walk outside, plop down at the picnic table, toe the dirt as my cousin walks up. I ask him where his father is, he flicks me on the head and says he’s dead, Stupid. I ask where the dead go. His lip trembles and I think he’s going to cry. He’s twelve and I know he doesn’t want to cry in front of me. He stammers a bit then blurts out that the priest says we either go to heaven or to hell.

So which one is your father going to? He shrugs. I hope heaven so I can see him there someday, but he cursed a lot, and I don’t know if God will open the gates of heaven for him. I’m going to learn to pick locks ’cause maybe when I die he’ll be waiting, and I can let him in.

after the wake
framed in the window
a cardinal

---

Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Loch Raven Poetry Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, One Art, Panoply, Rat’s Ass Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Literary Nest, The New Verse News, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best New Poets nominee. Her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.