REBECCA HAZELTON
 

MANIFEST DESTINY

Your best friend coveted and confiscated your wife in the back of a pickup truck –
Now she blushes at his name.
                                                    Your child: prone to delusions.  He opens his mouth

and a scroll spools out,  Gothic script.   He proclaims himself Lord. 
These outbursts are tamped down with higher dosage. 
Look at him,
                        doing his homework.  Geography: the map of the world.   

His pockets jingle with nails.  If working is to work a job, he will never
be right.  Because of him, she won’t leave, She’s yours forever.
Would you like more coffee?  Would you?  Dear? 

You want to slap her face until she slumps
                                                                    and scatters across the kitchen tiles. 
You want to roll your fat, medicated son tighter and tighter until he could fit

inside an amber plastic pill bottle.  This life you’ve made is fragile. 
All the insignificant moments that built to make
                                                                             this morning tableau  

(the droplets of water gently cutting a path
                                                                    over the milk bottle’s sloping
white expanse; the thick planes of burnt toast; an ocean of egg curds, uncharted) 

can be easily dispersed.  Deliver the kitchen pristinely empty, the house vacant,
and voices made sweeter with silence.
                                                            It could be your hand guiding 

the minivan through an unbroken chain of luminous exit signs, 
in a land where the eyelets of the highway lace tight,
                                                where the odometer’s glory does not exceed yours.    

Rebecca Hazelton received an MFA from University of Notre Dame and will be attending Florida State University in the creative writing Ph.D. program.  She has been previously published in Margie and Salt Hill.