Marianne Kunkel

I GUESS

Right after my parents’ divorce, people blurted the single question they’d been dying to ask for years. How’d they last a day? Great sex, I was tempted to respond, as if the thought of my sour mother fondling my father’s new rebellion, a ponytail, wasn’t joke enough. I guess long ago they made each other happy. What a sad thing to have to guess. Once my mother spoke of a nightmare in which she walked to our front door; in pitch dark, she twisted the knob and a hand from outside twisted back. I imagine if I shined a flashlight on that intruder’s face, I’d see my ever-frustrated father. Proximity without loving was their creed, him plucking a guitar in a room off the kitchen, her clicking a noisy blender on, and so I couldn’t believe it when my father said Enough after all those nights he laid in their waterbed, flirting with escape but drifting nowhere. —from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

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Marianne Kunkel: “My high school English teacher dropped a Marianne Moore poem on my desk after class one day. At the time I liked reading poetry, but it took realizing I shared a name with a famous poet for me to see myself in it. I started writing.” (web)

Related* “Reverence” by Marianne Kunkel * “A Sloth First Hears Its Name” by Marianne Kunkel * “When Our Parents Fight” by Jared Harel