Love Poem After Divorce

Four years after the split, we still,
every morning, send the day’s Wordle score.
Solved in three guesses, five, four.
Rarely, but it does happen– two.
Six gets a Phew from the New York Times Wordle bot,
and we echo it in our text: Phew!
And– that’s it. Sometimes our only communication
for the day. I can’t explain why.
We didn’t do this when we were married.
No easy back and forth; no morning ritual.
Of course, we shared inside jokes– probably thousands.
But most days, it’s difficult for me now
to remember what they were. When I try,
they evade. I squint hard, then harder–
it’s like that stress dream where you can’t read a bit of simple writing.
The more you force it, the more you try to focus,
the blurrier the text becomes. Infuriating.
So many memories are just out of reach,
a ghost I’m always trying to catch in my eye’s corner.
Look full on and it’s gone. But relax the vision,
soften the gaze, and sometimes, every now and then,
something will present itself, clearly, through the fog. Little scraps
of that former life, a tattered kite no longer fit to sail.
Songs about the dog, long dead. A fight about a Christmas card.
The night, so early into our marriage, two rats ran out of the fireplace,
and my screams, equal parts terror and glee. Snow. Oceans. Wasn’t that all of it?
Four years later, people still want to know what happened.
I want to say: everything and nothing. I want to say:
your guess is as good as mine. I don’t say much.
The time for explanation has come and gone.
I plug letters into the little blocks, morning after morning.
Grey; yellow; green. Impressive, the Wordle bot tells me.
I want to say: yes. After all this, and maybe just in this moment
(but can’t that be enough?) I will let myself be impressed too.

*

Sipsey River, Alabama; September

Lake winnows to river, river winnows to creek.
Watery branches trickle and wing like roots spreading
through soil, like veins spreading under skin,
like watercolor bleeding into paper. You have come
to the cabin for a long weekend. You have come
to be nowhere, to be gone. You find leftover fireworks
in a cupboard and light them without fanfare.
Two months too late; USA. Still, it feels good
to write your name with a sparkler.
Childhood wasn’t wrong about everything. It feels good
to say, with low-level gunpowder: I exist. I am.
You watch as the letters blaze, tiny stars furling and unfurling.
There is brief spangle then a vanishing act, only the ghost
of the word left behind. Where is the applause
when you need it? Where is the validation?
Where is your mother? Where are any of us?
Off the map; off the grid. Earlier, you watched from the dock
as a snake zipped through the water, cocksure and insolent.
He was daring you to say something. You can’t stop
anthropomorphizing. Two dogs show up at the cabin’s back door,
panting with country drawls. They are hitting on you.
They are off color, making bad jokes from the bushes.
Country Dog One and Country Dog Two, like a traveling bit.
The porch light has attracted every insect
from a five mile radius and you swear they are
humming, singing, every bit as American as
anybody else. Sweet land of liberty, sweet land
of dried river banks and no wake zones; boats blasting
Kenny Chesney songs about trucks and shimmying
out of cutoffs; Trump reimagined as a steroid-pumped warrior
on a gas station’s flag. You had pulled over for ice,
but from behind the machine, one kitten emerged,
and then two, and then five. Mewling, crying for all the m’s–
mama; milk, more. You would have liked
to take the smallest one home–
he was orange and a loudmouth. The joke writes itself.
Instead, you traveled on, highway-bound and kittenless,
dazed by their sweetness in an ugly world,
a vulnerability insisting upon itself in a way that felt brave,
or maybe just stupid. It’s hard to tell these days.
You can’t remember what’s true. You didn’t even remember
to buy that ice that you stopped for.

*

Anna Lowe Weber, originally from Louisiana, lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her poetry and fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Tar River Poetry, and the Idaho Review, among other journals.