The children threw us both away,
chicken feed to the birds when you passed.
The house for sale with the garlic press,
the copper pots I made clean sold for ten cents each.
The beige crocheted lace that outlined the front door window
your boots caked with field mud scenes.
our wedding pictures, the picture of Hunter the dog,
gone to a bidder visiting estate sales.

Nothing feels like earth in my new home.
I pull old apple tree silhouettes in memory
through the kitchen windows
frenzied black lines in the dawn without a crunch
walking dreams that take me to the
beginning when we were warm and full.

I am a chicken without fat in this grassless yard,
a bent woman tied straight in a chair
watching the nurses go by delivering
dried cod fillet. potatoes and applesauce
with a dab of fake whipped cream.
They promise me  there will be more minutes
to recall the stained potholders on the hooks,
and the red wine stains on the curtains in the summer kitchen
where we got drunk when you were ill,
where the peonies you planted bloomed outside the window.
It all drifts in my head, rivers before this frost.
No children visit me.
You and I grew in that quiet home,
ate curry in the yard, met the spitting Llamas
our neighbors bought. Loved well.

Elizabeth Glixman is a poet, writer and artist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in many publications including Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Her Circle Ezine, Frigg, Meow Poetry, Journey anthology and Velvet Avalanche, an anthology of erotic poetry. Her author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, Eclectica and the anthologies Chocolate for A Woman’s Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching (Pudding House Publications, 2008), Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2010), and The Wonder of It All (Alternating Current, 2011). I Am the Flame (Finishing Line Press) is forthcoming July 2012.