day SEVEN HUNDRED and SEVENTY SEVEN

DIVORCE & MASS SHOOTINGS IN THE TIME OF TRUMP

She wants a divorce, flips a coin for the cat, kisses you goodbye. 
The usual mixed message. 

You pay for dinner, and I’ll pay attention, she’d laugh when you two were dating. 
You thought it was a joke but now you know better.

Why are there no straight lines from you to anywhere? 
your wife cries from behind the steering wheel of the Beemer.

You know the answer: Everything’s shifting. It’s all a façade.  
Vegas is a desert, you warn. Built on sand. But she drives off anyway.

No one loves anyone anymore.

The bedsheets smell like your wife. You pull them over your head. 
When you think of her, your stomach snakes.

I’m too old to start over, you complain to your Facebook friends. 
For company you buy a new cat, and a rifle.

You wake to the next mass shooting. This time Las Vegas.  
Why not call it ‘The Mandalay Bay Massacre?’ you ask the cat.

Or the ‘Country Music Catastrophe?’ the cat answers. 
All those music fans, doomed as lovers in a country song.

The divorce papers arrive via messenger. Your wife wants everything. 
The cat laughs. Of course she does!

No one listens to reason anymore, why should you?
 
Enough days without her, shut in with the cat and an M-16, and 
you understand the mindset of the mass shooter:
 
If you buy a gun you must learn to shoot it. 
You almost have to shoot it.

for Leo Kolp 
First published in Galleywinter, Poetry,January, 2019

--Alexis Rhone Fancher

                                            Photography by Alexis Rhone Fancher