Ronnie's Hallucinations

Monday, July 15, 2013
Ronnie’s hallucinations
started running together:
a pair of blinking
lizard heads in his box
of fried rice,
the ashes from his stepdaughter’s
nightgown scattered
over the backseat
of his pickup truck,
a tablet of Klonopin
stuck in the end of each
tiny cigarette he pulled out
of the package he bought
at the ice cream stand not
ten minutes before returning home
to hear his wife
banging her head
into the wall of bathroom tile
he had misplaced in the garage
earlier that day: over
and over again,
like the metronome
that was hidden
inside the pearl-handled
pistol his mother kept tucked
inside the thrift store handbag
they buried her in.
Monday, July 1, 2013