Michael Flanagan

Vacation

We flew into Key West and taxied to a five-star resort,
view of the ocean, lime infused water by the elevators,
jet skis for rent at the private dock, the room a suite
to hold my fourteen-year-old daughter, her best friend,
my wife and I for ten days away from our world, though
we brought my little girl's unsmiling expression, strands
of hair hiding her eyes, ideas of ending it all before her life
actually begins, depression haunting her like fog on a winding
road, telling us in the most honest way suicide was a thing
she felt she needed to do but didn't want to. Salt air, ocean
breezes. Sitting on the deck overlooking the water her friend
runs a hand over my daughter's hair, smiles. My heart breaks
a little, then we go eat Cubano sandwiches at a Cuban restaurant
the locales favor, come back to the room, change into bathing
suits, swim in the ocean. That night the two girls meet a boy
their age at the pool. When we want to go back to the room
they ask if they can hang out a while longer. My wife
and I agree, happy in the elevator having seen our child show
an interest in something other than sleeping for the first time
in eight months. Later when the girls are back, they tell us the boy
is there with his grandparents, his father and mother having died
a few months ago, in a terrible car crash only he had survived,
that he is an only child brought away from his home in Wisconsin
with the idea it might help him get over the tragedy. Neither
my daughter or her friend think it's working. With the stars
in the sky and jasmine rising from below I lay in bed with my wife
listening to the waves break at the shoreline, afraid I'll seem like
a man who cares only about himself if I reach over and touch her,
the siren in the distance sounding like an ambulance on its way
to rescue, or fail to rescue somebody from something.

 

December

Waking you realize the bedroom is freezing. It's Sunday.
If the furnace is broken the cost of an emergency call
will be astronomical. You stay under the covers another
hour imagining what the problem might be. Rising
you touch a button on the thermometer. The cover falls
from the wall, one battery where there should be two.
You find a second battery, place it with the first, connecting
the thermometer. It reads sixty though it's set for seventy.
Clicking it up to seventy-two you climb back in bed, try to
dream your way into sleep though it's already close to noon.

Later you read about a woman who has acted in the theatre
in New York, playing the same off-Broadway part for thirty
years. She teaches acting and helps run the theatre and when
her husband died he left her a midtown pizzeria she's kept
open the four years he's been gone. She has a Manhattan
brownstone, two cats, a dog, goes to the same church
service each morning in the same church for twenty years,
the mass a time for reflection, giving her a sense of peace.

Eating a bowl of Fruit Loops, you see it's beautiful out, snow
coming down, dark skies, wind swirling the air white.
You blink twice and turn away, feel regret about the grind
you've settled into, far from the city you love, a marriage
that might not be right, job no more than a paycheck. Eying
a half-eaten bag of pistachio nuts it feels good for a moment
knowing you'll eat them later, cold Pepsi in hand, quietly
watching a movie after most of the world has gone to bed.

 

Michael Flanagan's full-length collection, Days Like These (Luchador/Subsidiary of Spartan Press) is out now. His chapbook, A Million Years Gone, won the 2009 Nerve Cowboy chapbook contest. It is available from Nerve Cowboy's Liquid Paper Press.