LUNCH TIME

I have one word for this poem. Endurance.

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors. ~Antonio Porchia

Lunch Time

A riveting wild smile, the girl turned into
every woman as she walked through parallel doors.
The slow flow of her intimacy came from within and
she was camouflaged inside her demur destiny of
feathered words and unspoken lifetimes.

Unspoken between the turned kitchen table
and the white alleyway of a frozen bed,

between the rage of words unsaid,
each etched in the memory of a stone,
and between the lives that follow her
from a hundred states of black, white, and gray.

Each minute left a little bit of someone else
in her pining mouth,
in her pulsing fluid soul,
in her fate of dictated wills, all
churning in rhythmic certainty.

She was incapable of staying; all the while
she was incapable of moving away.
She was simply incapable of departing
on that day her children came home.