Yesterday’s crumbs on the counter annoyed me. I swore under
my breath, swept them into a pile with the back of my hand.
Tonight, muddy boot prints sneered by the back door. I gave
as good as I got. Tomorrow? Another driver will run a red light,
and I’ll mutter profanities before stepping into the crosswalk.
When my mother grew testier with age, I blamed menopause
for her mood change, but the dark took, stretching tight
as a rubber-band slingshot. We found clues after she died——
her diary of blues. Can you know someone you haven’t seen
all the way through? Three days in a chapel with a corpse,
my mother-in-law’s, and I saw that while her stepmother
had sent her away as a girl, an alien half-brother lived nearby,
appeared at the wake to lean over the casket with remorse.
We later unearthed her pains in a drawer, flat as cold birds.
I won’t stash revenge in a dresser. A colleague who lied his way
up the ladder? My candles and chants cost him most of his hair.
Keli Osborn lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she walks, writes, and pulls weeds. A former newspaper reporter and local government manager, she volunteers with community organizations. Keli’s poems have appeared in Timberline Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, San Pedro River Review, and other journals, as well as in collections including Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press) and The Absence of Something Specified (Uttered Chaos, other presses). Living well may be the best revenge, but the vengeance meted out in Godfathers 1 and 2 have haunted her for decades, particularly Michael Corleone’s transformation into a coolly brutal mobster gunning down a police captain and gangster in a café, dispatching with his brother-in-law, and delivering his brother, Fredo, the kiss of death.
