With this ring, I see red
No A/C, driving from L.A. to Vegas——
desert heat, a crimson-coil hairdryer.
His ex-wives crawl from the glove box
like scorpions,
fodder for arguments about coins,
about air-conditioning.
He isn’t my exes. He isn’t.
I see red.
Courthouse line——
long, ragged—almost-newlyweds:
show a passport, get a spouse.
the DMV of matrimony——
take a number, please!
He says I’m counting wrong. I say he’s breathing wrong.
Couples rehearse vows; we rehearse gripes.
Screw the chapels——
we’ll take the stamp-and-process option.
“A promise is a promise!”
he snaps. I see red.
County courthouse——linoleum slick
as a stable floor after rain.
Lieutenant Howard Bell,
retired cop turned security guard——
our impromptu witness——
flashes his badge-smile, mirage over chrome.
The judge tastes the fight-crimson
rising off me,
leans forward, concerned: “Ma’am, are you sure?”
Pascal——windup parrot,
dogged mimic——
recites the vow in a language
he doesn’t quite grasp:
“With this ring,” he says— “I see red?”
Howard’s laugh breaks loose
like a sparkler,
the judge snort-guffaws,
her robe a sail of decorum and heat
in the stale courthouse air.
Pascal shines for his new audience,
riffing like he can’t stop the set.
I shoot him a look, we whisper-fight while
she heat-stamps the paper;
his hand finds my front pocket——I see red.
I hadn’t booked a room. “Vegas always has rooms——
the city a furnace of chimeras and sand!”
I’d promised, naïve.
We circle glass towers——“NO VACANCY”
flickering, like epileptic wings on a bat——
laughing once at the absurdity, between curses.
I see red.
Honeymoon: a last-chance motel out of town,
back in the desert——
bells ringing, lights buzzing,
crusty gamblers feeding coins
to decrepit machines.
No double bed, only twins——
it’s all they had left;
we lie back-to-back in separate beds,
quiet now, grinning at the ceiling,
I saw red.
Those greedy bastards can go fuck themselves
You staged his funeral like a sideshow,
dragged in a stage-prop “mistress,”
forced her eulogy——
my face the punchline.
At the pulpit:
a candle with borrowed grief,
a mask mouthing myth.
You looked like fools.
Don’t touch me.
Your offal is a jaw:
I taste your odium like iron fillings,
tinfoil on molars, rotting teeth.
Arrived as heirs, lunging like sharks——
boas skulking in the reef.
And now here they are,
those turgid snakes,
you dressed up in their scales.
When your father’s breath sparked its last,
I was ill, hospitalized——
oxidized.
You used my car——never asked,
just slithered in.
But for the funeral——of course——
you made me take
a taxi home. “We’re just too tired.”
You stole shit from my house,
cleared out the furniture you disliked,
built a fire, scorched it——
and then denied it all.
Make no mistake: his ashes are all mine,
I will scatter them
where I please——
you’ll get nothing more
from us.
Your only currency: clink and tally.
Your native tongue: clamor, paper drift.
Paper suffocation, strangulation.
Signatures sealed,
stamp on stamp.
I will torch it all——sear what binds,
what you project. Set your locks alight.
Let the burnt-hair stink dog you——
let black smoke ignite your peace.
Your gospel sings of money,
but all you’ll get from me
is mortal hiss1
1 mortal hiss: author’s Topologies of Variance Geometrics in Stepwise, Piecewise, and Related Quasi-Periodic Functional
Structures: An Imaginary Treatise in Applied Matchematics (unpublished), Vol. VI, p.66
Marie Macri is an American mathematical engineer and poet living in rural France. She works in financial modeling and writes poetry when she is not building models, debugging spreadsheets, or explaining the same thing twice. She would like to adopt every single dog she encounters and has yet to accept that this is entirely impractical. Her poems are occasionally motivated by unfairness, bad behavior, and situations in which she has been expected to be agreeable. Her favorite revenge story is marrying the man anyway and being entirely right about it.
