On TV There Are Two Women Kissing poetry by Elodie Townsend
There’s a girl in the back garden and she’s burying plastic dinosaurs. Damn the weatherman and his dark clouds! Inside the house, you’re banging fists on the coffee table and making grief sounds like car alarms in an empty parking garage or the pounding of a well-oiled mitt, with the open-mouth moan of the freeway behind. The girl in the garden is getting mud on her jeans. You find your heartache in the small things— The machete-path through the weeds on the way up to the water towers, the rusty ladder on the roof of the abandoned church that Massachusetts winter. The waiting room to heaven is a wood-shingled house with a short-sloped drive, and you’re standing on the concrete porch, in your flip-flops, waiting. On TV, there are two women kissing, and the girl in the garden has finished digging.
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