Blood, I Wonder (a sonnet) + Love Notes to his Dead Wife

Blood, I Wonder (a sonnet)

Plane lands. Vegas, and like always, a set
of girls dance on the escalator. Boys
claim what they’ll drink, hail an Uber through sweat
stench, cologne, cigarettes, fried chicken, oil,

coffee, exhaust, the eye-searing heat, as
spent men, travel-hot women, all vexed in
the taxi line. We wait to inch our bags
forward, a worm for shade. Palms, all maudlin

for hard-sheen piles. Their veneer stands ready
to take. Our lights, are they what brought you? This
bash-clang strip? Your empty ache to see see
see? Driver asks. I say family. Is

this what makes us blood, I wonder, that I
have come back here to watch my father die?

Love Notes to his Dead Wife

Coded and brilliant, his fervent handwriting
inside all her books. I tore one out on a winter day

while sorting titles. It was a crime I ripped
to tiny squares. Understand, it’s not jealousy. My shame

over post card bookmarks for the poems where he thought
of her, his professions on the back in blue ink. He thought she had a crown

sewn into her hair, magic, clever. She grew wildflowers
in her eyes. He penned the word always

most often. In the new book, one for my birthday, I thumb open
the orange cover, past the blue cover sheet, copyright, title page. Feeling

for an ink-blue sign. Silly to ask
a thing to live twice.

Kari Despain is an English instructor and a new resident of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been featured most recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Writer’s Review, Watershed Review, Ponder Review, The Windhover, I-70 Review, and other publications.