Jessica Purdy
My Gargoyle Husband
First time I notice him formed in concrete he is crouched in the corner of the living room as I try to watch my favorite new Nordic Noir thriller, Dead Girl with Blue Lips. “Is this what I have to look forward to,” I say, “a husband squatting on the rug with frozen dragon eyes and his tongue sticking out?” He’s good at not taking himself too seriously. He doesn’t answer, but I think I hear him chuckle. I try to continue watching my show, eating strawberry rhubarb pie with whipped cream on top. He never wants to watch shows I like, and falls asleep to the worst nightly news. Words like ferocity, violence, and precision trigger him into catatonia. Me, I just get nauseous when real people do violence. Give me the intrigue of ghosts, a naked blue-lipped corpse on a slab at the morgue. White pancake makeup clotted in the fine hairs of her cheek. The best is when the detective gets the corpse to Face ID the locked iPhone. They have to shock the dead girl with electricity to make her resemble herself again. My gargoyle husband doesn’t like to sit through a whole hour and a half episode with no resolution, can’t imagine who the killer might be. I’ve figured it out ten minutes in: it’s always someone she trusts. The man-at-the-top who nails her windows shut to protect her, but really he’s locking her in. My husband the gargoyle has wide-stretched wings, an open mouth with sharp teeth. A conduit for water flow. When it rains words from his mouth I pause the show and listen, asking questions when appropriate. Ten hours later, the final episode reveals how the girl was murdered, hit in the head with a stone statue. Grotesque. I have to bend down to get rid of him. It takes all my effort to heave him off the floor, but I waddle him outside like I’m helping a toddler walk, and mount him on the corner of the house to keep the rain out.
The End of Daylight Saving Time
The rim of my glasses hits the windowpane, I’m that close. Looking out just past dusk. It’s November now and hungry darkness consumes the landscape. A furtive branch shakes its secret. It’s hard to see if there had been a bird. Did it see me inside, here in my electricity? All day the wind took the milkweed ghosts from my yard. One of the thousands even got sucked into the house on its inhale. The door, the house’s mouth. The seed hung quiet in the lung before I snatched it and breathed it back outside. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to. Sun glares, runs fast, blasts. Now, the rust has been ripped from the trees’ fingers like loose receipts in a windy parking lot. Now, they are penniless. Now, the branches are darker than the dark descending. My eyes flick to see the neon red eyes of taillights receding, reflected twice in the neighbor’s windows. The way they move reminds me of childhood. Night drives. Rain coming. There are lives other than my own.
How My Mom Started Dating Elvis
My mom and I saw Elvis walk past our window one evening in spring. We could tell it was him even though he had gray hair and walked with a cane. What gave him away were his lapels. His chest hair was white. We lived on the second floor in a city apartment. Our ceiling was falling in and water dripped into a bucket on the floor. She yelled out the open window to him. Sing me a love song! He barely paused but when he looked up at us, we knew he wasn’t going to be singing. Instead, my mother started crooning Can’t Help Falling in Love. Imagine singing to the King after all these years he was dead. Oh, there had been speculation. Sightings. But no one had ever sung to him like my mother did that night.
Jessica Purdy is the author of six books of poetry including Lung Hours, chosen by Marsha de la O as a winner of Gunpowder Press’ Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Her chapbook The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press) received the NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Action, Spectacle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She lives in New Hampshire.
