3/28/2021 Poetry by Dorie LaRue Bruce Guenter CC Aunt Mabel’s Cup of Passion Under the protection of bankruptcy Uncle John eased into an alcoholic and one morning after threw the Easter ham straight into Aunt Mabel's blue-heavy hydrangea bushes. Drunk, Uncle John stole his neighbor's lawn mower and sold it to a stranger and one moon-void night filled his wife’s gas tank with sugar. Really no one's uncle, and Mabel no one's aunt, but it was she whom the whole church adored because, but for the capriciousness of God, went we. And her eyes behind her legendary specs, constantly considered, in a sweetly tenacious way, the lilies of the field, though truth be told her cup made Christ's passion look more like a walk in the park. Aunt Mabel worked in the canning center, slinging slabs of beef “like a man.” At church, her lenses resembled cut glass crystal designed by the globs of fat slung all week, which, if left unsmeared by the teasing boy, did not entirely obscure her view of the stained-glass Jesus's tap dance on water, the vestibule cloyed with flowers from someone's bright garden, the front pew of children, like bobbing daisies, none hers. She was our hero, a sufferer more real than those in our Catholic cousins’ Lives of Martyrs. Codependant, they call it now. Never mind I ended up too busy with college and marriage and divorces to much remember her because her telltale symptoms were mirrored in my own floor to ceiling misery, weeping at Whole Foods, pointlessly plotting revenge, an Ahab anger at God, love-shorn stories with the saddest endings flapping out of my mouth like ugly jay birds. Once I came home by bus and plane and my bored brother’s Dodge Dart. Aunt Mabel was dead, John’s storm-wracking vapor trail eclipsing her prolonged plod. If I remember it was winter that visit. The road was a little dim although the headlights were on, bright, that moment night first seeps around the beams, asserting its doomed desire to hone and control. I think we were passing their long scrub oak-lined driveway devoid now of curses and specious cures. The clouds must have parted just at that moment and the moon lit up the trunks right angled to the iced over gravel, like a strip of coastline, and above, but just for a second as I said, limbs whipped in nervy dance. At that point, I shivered, or as they say in the South, a rat ran over my grave. That old gal is pushing daisies, my brother said, out of the dark in his side of the car, like there were daisies in winter. or hydrangeas round as full breasts in someone’s blue bottomless gaze. It’s not spring, man, I said. Choose another cliché. It was dark enough after that for the yellow blade of a comet or even a shooting star subtending like a tiny leaped fish to punctuate something, but nothing happened. No one ever tells the truth about love. Dorie LaRue is the author of two novels, Resurrecting Virgil, and The Trouble With Student Affairs; and two collections of poetry, Mad Rains, and An Enemy in Their Mouths. She obtained her Ph.D. in English at the University of Louisiana. She lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and teaches writing at LSUS. Comments are closed.
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