Maureen Thorson

Bad Exes

You awake at Christmas-time
from your happy future
recalling how that one made fun of your laugh,
and that one said you weren’t as pretty
as your sister.
The snow is smooth and beautiful.
Chickadees flit between the pines.
But your forehead looks like a wrinkled dune.
You’re as cross
as an intersection
over a man so scared of you
it took three years for him to come get the desk
he left in your apartment
and even then sent his older half-brother to do it
while you were at work.
You lugged that stupid thing
down stairs and tried to hide it
behind the posts holding up the porch
so it wouldn’t get jacked
by a rando with the means
to walk off with a 60-lb chunk of mahogany.
What the hell was that about?
Pancake-smell is wafting from downstairs
along with laughter from your husband’s cousins,
your husband who you aren’t thinking of
because he’s never made you hate yourself.
You put your hand over your face
and try to think of lovelovelove,
how fairytales end like wars do,
when something shivers the sky
into splinters and quiet. When
the villains meet their match