Two Poems

Underpants

My Value Village doesn’t take underwear. I could not possibly throw nearly a month’s worth of his briefs down the chute to be landfill-crushed, so I’ve made them a lair in one of my own deep drawers. Do I hear them thrumming in there? They don’t feel like they were ever filled by him. Their condition, flattened, piled like leaves, is spiritual, the most disembodied of underpants

never again waiting to wrap his ass, his athlete’s glutes — nor expecting to. They’re now the residents of a dresser, tame sirens of the derrière, red, navy, black in a penis parlance, and as I pull the knob, I hear them humming as he always did throughout the day, orange and grey representatives of his choices haunting with their cotton voices.

Ghost

When I first went to bed with someone else after my husband died, I thought I’d have to be half-crazy to take my clothes off, but then I looked up, and there he was at the foot of the bed: the very one I thought I’d have always, but who became a ghost. I watched him go off into his afterlife beyond our bedroom that is so cozy I sometimes eat dinner here with the little gas fireplace and the TV.

Neutral as a figure on a tomb, he studied the new human in my lair. Then he turned and disappeared as we, the new we, began to move together. His spectre came from me, yet visited me with his permission. Then, as it receded farther, my body felt her worth again, as if I’d been a ghost, returned at last to this earth.