Heidi Seaborn

For my first marriage,

I borrowed my wedding dress from a friend—
white silk, lace bodice, back buttoned, slender.
She had carried a slender bouquet of calla lilies.
In another decade, I’ll have a garden
of calla lilies by the sea. I have untangled
the roots of my memories, laid them to dry
like pasta. Once I was poor and ate only pasta
that hung like socks from the windowsill.
Years later in Spain, the laundry flutters
in the garden, the dryer broken. Another
marriage broken. We gathered our clothing
off the clothesline then said goodbye
for good. After calla lilies bloom,
their long stalks reduce to slime that I wash off
the stone path with a scrub brush and bleach.
My sister once bleached her hair the shade of sun
setting. She wanted to be silky blonde, a girl
she imagined with long lean legs; stride lit
from within. Lit like a taper, wick charred.
I have learned to live with wildfires like smoke
of cigarettes from a time I tired of refusing.
Lit up at night after the children gone
to bed. The white cigarette traced my ennui
in every gesture. I have broken
all my fingers at one time or another.
Once I had a wedding ring cut off my finger.
I thought of leaving
for the evening at least, to a bar or club.
I could dance even now. At my first wedding,
I discovered the dress had a bustle for dancing.
At my last, caught in the train of my white silk
wedding dress, I stubbed my toe.
I had carried blush pink peonies flown in
at great expense. My only extravagance.

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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of [PANK] Book Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (2019) and the 2020 Comstock Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks. Recent work in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Cortland Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com