brunch with a neighbor |
Issue 16
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ninety-nine years and ten months
give you the right to make jokes about how you won’t live long enough to benefit from that home insurance policy you just renewed, and that your yellow back lawn will be someone else’s problem soon; but lacking that same length of life I doubt I have the right to laugh with you and I’m struck by the same sense of impropriety I feel whenever I don’t see you for a few days and I wonder if you’re dead; because we both silently know that one of these mornings I will call your landline—the last one in existence I know of—and you won’t answer-- I will be greeted by an electronic echo of your shaking voice that will no longer share endless stories of golf and your nursing career and the million friends I can’t keep straight; but somehow this truth is only yours to speak and I can’t utter the word death in your presence-- probably because I fear that day when I will sense the weight of your absence from down the street, and the three percent of your life that has overlapped with mine will be concluded; so I just nod seriously and say that at least your insurance policy will give you peace of mind, and you concede that’s true |
Sharisa Aidukaitis is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Penstricken, Moss Piglet, The Quarter(ly), Drifting Sands Haibun, Sublimation, and others.
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