My neighbor’s walls are falling down, only you wouldn’t know it by the way she sits on the step, cigarette in one hand, cheap paperback from her physical therapist’s office in the other, watching our boys play trucks in the road. There's a certain way she shrugs off the story of her baby daddy, caught fooling around with his thirteen year old niece, locked up for twenty years.
She would laugh if she knew I try to connect her stories with my own, use them as metaphor for the things falling down in my own life … my marriage, the economy, my car about to blow up for lack of oil …
Robert Frost once said all metaphor breaks down at some point, and that was the beauty of it. I guess yes, most things that are fragile are considered valuable for their fragility and therefore beautiful.
But there's nothing fragile in the thickness of this woman’s shoulders. There's nothing beautiful about divorce, even the second time around when you think you know where to look. Metaphor has no place here as we wait and watch, the boys scooping dirt in their tiny fists and dumping it in little yellow trucks.
Helen Peterson is the managing editor of Chopper Poetry Journal out of New London, Ct, and has previously published in Fell Swoop, Main Channel Voices, Gloom Cupboard, Tonopah Review, Cartier Street Review, Poor Mojo’s, Wilderness House Review, Battered Suitcase, diddledog, Hiss Quarterly, Right Hand Pointing, Elimae, Haruah, Zygote in My Coffee, Pedestal Magazine (book review), Literary Fever, Debris Magazine, and Poetrybay, among others. Currently she has work in Out of Our and Elephant, and will have work in the upcoming spring issue of poeticdiversity. Her work was also featured in The Work Book, an anthology put out by Poet Plant Press in 2007. For more information about Chopper, visit the Myspace page www.myspace.com/chopperjournal.
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