Lucas Cardona

Laura

The day I begged you to break off
your engagement and abscond with me
to Oregon, you were crying on my bed, gazing 

out the window at a black squirrel
scampering over clumps of snow and mud
scattered like horse manure in my parent’s yard. 

The ground looked ravaged that winter
as if an encampment of soldiers had pillaged
their neighborhood of tract houses. 

I almost believed you would leave him.
Face it—you were already marching
through your model floorplan—

open kitchen, island counter, linen closet—
of your new home in Fox River Grove.

I remember the day we went to see it.
The For Sale sign, still staked into the lawn,
was creaking, creaking.

We parked in the drive and gawked
at the three-car garage through the cracked
windshield of your blue, shit

Honda with the cheetah print
steering wheel cover. Some kids
playing roller hockey skidded up 

to a girl walking an ancient Dachshund.
I kept glancing in the rearview—
“He’s at work; I told you.”

But it wasn’t your fiancé that scared me—
it was the man I saw standing behind the car,
staring at us through the windshield, the man 

I’m looking at right now from the other
side of that long mirror behind the bar
thirteen years later. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lucas Cardona is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he taught in the creative writing department for three years. This year, he was a finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize from Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poetry has appeared in The Greensboro Review and New Ohio Review.