HOW GORILLA GLUE COULDN’T SAVE MY MARRIAGE
When I got married, my friend
got me a gift certificate to Williams & Sonoma.
I used it to buy a butter dish, a bread knife,
and some fancy cheese I didn’t end up liking.
Two years later, she jumped
off a bridge in Boston into the Mystic River.
A few years later, my husband broke
the handle off the butter dish,
and then he left me, too. He didn’t break
the butter dish on purpose, but I think about it
all the time—the way he used Gorilla Glue
to put the knob back on after I threw
myself on the kitchen floor, crying.
It’s just a butter dish, he said, and he wasn’t wrong,
I guess, but he was. If it’s stupid
to have an emotional attachment
to a butter dish, that’s okay.
But I’ve loved it longer
than my husband could love me,
and I’ll let you decide what that means.
*
Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Look for her work in The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.
Stunning poem. Felt every word. I especially love the ending.