Anne Marie Wells
It Was An Accident*
I learned a man I once loved died
three months after it happened.
His hair was wild like a blond werewolf when it wasn’t
pulled behind his head behind the bar at The Rose.
He’d start pouring my drink when he’d see me
walk in, even when hunched shoulders crowded
the countertop, huddled with folded bills waving like sails
eager to transport their patrons far away from the world’s
futileness, its nihilism. Several times I watched him leave
a lineup of shot glasses to mix my seltzer and lime, leaving
it on the end of the bar for me to pick up.
The library was holding a workshop
to learn how to write an obituary
and linked this wolf of a man’s
tribute as an example.
He had moved to California,
and I never noticed. No one
was going to bars in 2020. Not even those
who weren’t struggling with grief and sobriety.
He was working hauling lumber, steel beams,
and the like. Click after click I sought more
answers with my aspen-leaf fingers, and found
more questions. His semi floated right off the top
of the cliff. His body created a universe of glass
shattering the windshield on his way to the ground
before his truck landed on top of him.
He collected lamps.
Who found him? Who went to get him? Who dragged
the mangled metal off his body? Or what remained of it?
What remained of it?
What remains of him in my memory? I try and remember
every wink, every how are you? I think about that mane.
Had it ever known the love of a comb?
I found his parents in the Yellow Pages,
maybe. I wrote them a letter letting them
know a complete stranger thinks their son was wonderful,
and will remember his howling laugh the rest of her life.
I didn’t leave a return address. And I tell myself it’s because I didn’t
want them to feel obligated to respond. But, of course, it’s shame.
For making his death about me and my feelings. When I never
knew him. Not really. When I didn’t even know he died when
he died. I still hope it was his parents, though, and not someone who had never
heard his name. Maybe it would bring them a moment of joy. But if strangers
to him received my letter, then someone else would know this wolfman
existed, and for a couple of years, the sight of him lit me up
like the full moon in a Wyoming dark sky, like
an empty room holding a collection of lamps.
*****
Newsprint sky, the ceiling to a tunnel of green
tones, cornstalks waving hello as they whisper
goodbye. She squints, hypnotized by the yellow
lines, daydreaming of the fields, if they might
reserve one of the prayers each ear sends into the black,
if they might use their spears as steeples, form an acres-
wide congregation to render her decrepit eyes white
again, could they possibly build a miracle out of
Inadequate Materials.
You Asked Me To Write You a Poem About Coffee**
Baby, I love you like coffee.
Your morning face, warm in my hands,
perks me up the way the buzz of my alarm
never could. I want you to be the first
scent I breathe in, the first taste I swallow
when my eyes complain about the sun.
Baby, I love you like coffee.
Dressed in sugar, call you pretty names,
or strip you down bare and black. Take me
back to your origin story under the rain
forest canopies. Let my throat savor
your bitterness, trace the ring left
on the kitchen table with my tongue.
Baby, I love you like coffee.
And when we good, we so damn good,
and when we bad like cold dregs
from a gas station on the outskirts
of Albuquerque, Baby, I still want
that styrofoam cup filled to the brim.
Gulp you down to the grounds, let you
stain my teeth.
*"It Was an Accident" originally appeared in Voices de la Luna, 2022
** "You Asked Me to Write You a Poem About Coffee" originally appeared in The MacGuffin, 2022
