First the long running leak in the irrigation system, a simple plug for a simple hole. Then the car clock that hadn’t run in years. A fuse was all it took. So satisfying we sat in the front seat, held hands, and watched the digital numbers click by. You asked about my brother with Alzheimer’s, so I gave him a call. He didn’t know who I was, but it fixed my guilt. Before nightfall we washed the dog, fixed a broken hinge on the gate. Flushed with our success, we drug our lumpy mattress into the back yard and sat it on fire. In a fit of fixing righteousness we threw our clothes on the fire, then the sofa. We watched them burn as we repaired the broken parts of our world in the name of world peace, social justice, and a couple of infidelities we had along the way. Then you asked if we should leap into the flames ourselves, lie there till we curled up and turned to ash. Not yet, I said, for now things are as fixed as they are going to get.

Dan Gilmore

has published a novel, A Howl for Mayflower (Imago Press, 2009), and three collections of poetry and monologues, Season Tickets, Love Takes a Bow, and Panning for Gold. He has won the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Martindale Fiction Award, and multiple Sandscript Awards for Short Stories. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, San Diego Reader, Aethlon, Blue Collar Review, The Carolina Review, Sandscript, Loft and Range, and Serving House Journal.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Consternation and two other prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 9, Spring 2014)

⚡ The Hyperbolist and three other poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 8, Fall 2013)