Tara Gilbert-Brever

WET

Brooke calls her husband Wet.  She says that if you're
married to one you can call them that. Especially
if you have a baby with one of them.

Brooke met Manuel when she ran off with the circus.
She hated him at first, but he spoke Spanish
and his words rested on her ears like alien kisses.

Brooke never drank after that dusty Arizona night when an empty
bottle of tequila rattled in one hand, her full belly slept under
the other hand, and Manuel's snores rattled the motel bed. 

Brooke had a photograph of a dead Nazi grunt. She always
kept him in her busted wallet and passed him off as family,
having cut him from a library book when she was eleven. 

Brooke always could twist the truth -- as if it was
the nipple and she was the index and thumb.
Or like truth was a stove-knob fixed on high.

Brooke never did graduate from high school,
but she's planning to write a novel that will illustrate,
like a collage, how life has backhanded her.
 
Brooke and Manuel had a baby -- she flamed her way
into the world, ripping a hole in the atmosphere
between them. And so they named her Haley. 

Brooke has forgotten the sound of his Spanish, those words
that once perfumed her neck.  She only thinks of it as she shaves
her legs, then flattens her goosebumps with guava.

Brooke doesn't see that her spoiled baby shrieks
just like that comet, that she herself is sour as limes,
that her husband is drowning in her river by the mouthful.

Date of Birth: December 26, 1977 Location: Union Grove, Wisconsin Occupation: Graphic Design student Email: Yourwildhorses77@aol.com Publications: Eclectica, Primavera, Stirring, Children, Churches and Daddies, Poems Niederngasse, Wicked Alice, Poetalk, Blind Man's Rainbow , artisan, Copious, etc. Editor at: Eclectica

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