20 The Happy Hour
For an hour each night, the children bathed
and bedded down with stuffed bunnies and Pooh,
she lay white-nightied in the chirping dark to wonder
if her husband were alive, whiskey-soured and darting,
or in the literal gutter instead, with motorcycled men lit blue
in flashes attempting to identify grey matter, teeth, bone, glasses,
splattered, shattered, sharding the pavement, guard rail, trees, and grass.
Then the drone of exhausted rubber airless on asphalt ended the hour again.
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