Ever After

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Ever after

9:00 PM, kids are asleep
and we are in the kitchen
checking each other’s heads
for lice again. I run the fine
comb through your hair
comment on how thick
it is, come close
to mentioning the single
grey strand, but think
better of it; the off-brand
Imodium has only
started to calm
my digestive tract. Of all
the opportune moments
to get diarrhea, checking a beloved’s
head for lice isn’t one of them. You
twitch at the whine of a mosquito
and now the possibility that a family
of cretaceous bloodsuckers lives
in your hair. You are
a shaky tower of Jenga
on a wobbly wooden
chair; I am a water balloon
in a needle factory. For two weeks we couldn’t kiss
because of my impetigo, my face hemorrhoidal
due to the glossy anti-fungal lotion
across my nose
and forehead. As I recall
I was ten, the latest victim
of the Canada Fitness Test,
when I rubbed Preparation H
all over my legs, thinking it was a remedy
for sore muscles. Upon seeing my glowing thighs, Mom
and Dad laughed at my
misuse of the intimate ointment that
perhaps they both had used
at some point. I don’t know.
And I didn’t know it
then, but this – my parents,
disheveled and laughing –
was intimacy’s basement kitchen, bleached
of embarrassment and stocked
with meals, tin-foiled and
too rich for one person
to eat alone.

Author: Rocco de giacomo

Rocco de Giacomo is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, Australia, England, Hong Kong and the US. The author of numerous poetry chapbooks and full-length collections, his latest, Brace Yourselves – on the representation of the individual as it relates to the Zeitgeist – was published in January, 2018, through Quattro Books. His next collection, Casting Out, will be published in 2022 via Guernica Editions.  Rocco lives in Toronto with his wife, Lisa Keophila, a fabric artist, and his daughters, Ava and Matilda.