SEVENTEEN POCKETBOOKS | Irene Sherlock
The man who lost his wife of fifty-one years
is trying to figure out if he wants to live.
“The kids are not enough,” he says.
“Even asleep, I keep reaching for her.”
They had cocktails every night,
whisky sours on the weekend.
She liked the little smoked sausages
they got at Costco. He tried to get her
to watch her cholesterol but she said,
“Got to die of something.”
Four months and he still can’t remove
the glass of water by her nightstand.
Can’t take her toothbrush from its cup
or the face cream from the vanity.
He’s going through her things though.
The kids insisted.
“She had seventeen pocketbooks,”
he says in disbelief.
He describes her favorite,
a green leather handbag.
“Went perfect with her fuchsia lipstick,
she used to say. One of them
is this suede thing I think is so ugly,
but I never said nothing. She loved it.”
In the bottom of a denim satchel,
he will never throw out
a blue comb threaded
with gray-blonde hairs.
And in a checkered beach bag,
one sandal tangling her sunglasses
in its frayed strap. Also,
a crumpled pack of Salems
in a black velvet clutch.
“She was sneaking!
All that time,” he says.
He has unearthed a wife
he hadn’t quite known.
Each night, he picks
a different pocketbook,
lays it on her pillow,
and sometimes uncaps
and kisses the fuchsia lipstick.
Irene Sherlock is a dual-licensed marriage and family therapist and alcohol and drug counselor who lives and practices in Danbury, CT. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in many literary magazines, journals and in several anthologies. A chapbook of her poems, “Equinox,” was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press.