A Man Is Nothing Without His Wife

Ashley N. Goodwin

Gold strands framed her heart shaped face.

I’d follow the trail of brown dots that encircled her rosy cheeks.

But before I connected them like a constellation in the sky,

two beaming lights consumed me.

And I was nothing more

than a victim of her olive-green eyes.

I’d sail along the curvature of her lined lipstick

as a wave swept underneath to her cupids bow,

I’d get tossed overboard into the salmon waves.

And as I broke the surface and took a deep breath,

she puckered her lips

and always pulled me back under.

She expressed herself with the colors she wore.

Fabrics with repetitive shapes and lines.

She handpicked her fragrance every morning

from one of the four seasons.

Like she cherry picked at the blossom of spring,

or like she baked an apple pie without the fall foliage.

She said she never measured the time between us,

but she had an hourglass figure,

and flipped the meter.

After twenty-five years of marriage

and retirement in the infinite evergreens

in our cabin wasteland.

Although my wife’s skin drew in the winter blues,

and the lack of pulse left her bedridden and cold,

she no longer worried about what to wear. 

And when her intoxicating fumes overpowered her vanilla cinnamon

I put a piece of her in every room in our cabin,