on being two months married
By Charlene Kwiatkowski
Hey babe, we’re living in the after part you never see in movies or read about in books. Where you wake up to someone and their morning breath is enough to knock you out for another eight hours. Where dishes are continually dirty and you have another body to curl up with on the brown corduroy couch. Where you fight about groceries and make love in the same day. Where you have a ritual of reading to each other on nights of drizzling rain, and that book of choice is Harry Potter complete with badly butchered British, Irish, French, and Bulgarian accents. Where language is the hardest adjustment. Mine to ours, I to us. Where we keep slipping in and out of selfishness. Where we learn that Ways of Seeing is more than a book we read in art history but applies to the friends we keep and the resolutions we don’t. Where you know the other person is real by the sounds they make: buzz of a razor, crunch of almond cereal, creak of feet on hardwood floors. Where you notice their absence by what they leave behind: a black vest, a library book, a ceramic mug with two inches of coffee standing in the sink.
201-8625 Fremlin Street
By Charlene Kwiatkowski
Strangers enter with shoes, floors creaking
in protest. Boxes cramp the rooms,
spoiling the next renter’s photograph.
I can’t picture anyone else here,
I tell you over cereal and toast. Seven years
of mark-making: white walls holed with nails
that multiplied when you moved in.
The hallway skinny as a bowling alley
we birthed a couch through, the scream
of the shower each morning if we dare
request hot water, the evening light
pooling at bare feet as you read
some fantasy book beside me. We could count
stubbed toes and unseen wounds,
discarded pee sticks and appointments
hanging above the kitchen sink. At 2:30 am,
the strange knock in my womb.
Before I can think, my hand moves to skim
the thrill of making a home.
Four Years into your Diagnosis
By Charlene Kwiatkowski
Here is the fork you left
at last night’s dinner
the handle a long and graceful arc
the end sharp and decisive
to collect food from the plate
pitch into your mouth and
bite, but my explanations
get lost somehow.
We’ve had these forks for many
years, still shiny
I see my reflection and wonder
if I shave, will you recognize me?
Will you recognize me if I shave?
I see my wonder and reflect
on our shiny years, still
we’ve had many forks
some get lost
my explanations bite
I pitch into your mouth
a collection of food from the plate
A sharp and decisive end
or a long, ungraceful arc to handle?
At last night’s dinner
You left. The fork is here.
Charlene Kwiatkowski is a Canadian writer whose debut poetry chapbook ‘Let Us Go Then’ was published in 2021 with The Alfred Gustav Press. Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Barren Magazine, PRISM international, Vallum, and elsewhere. In 2020, she won Pulp Literature’s annual Magpie Award for Poetry. Charlene works at an art gallery and occasionally blogs at textingthecity.wordpress.com. She lives in Coquitlam, British Columbia with her husband, daughter, and twin sons.
Artwork Source: “Still Life (stilleben),” Brücke, 1908, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the public domain.
The Turning Leaf Journal 