At the Kitchen Table

POEM | Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli

At the Kitchen Table

I fall forward into the black funnel that was his mouth.

Falling past row upon row of spent black craters, troughs that held each tooth’s root and shout each marred and stunted thought. Black teeth. Black fingers. Black bread— the tablecloth lay between us like something dead with its shadowed folds of faded chintz that bent the way his oiled handprints crawled across a faded rose-patterned field—Nothing waits so long as this, to count, tap by tap, the time between a tired head’s loll and nod, until the spoon, dipped again into the soup’s bowl, lifts to enter his open mouth.