Southern Gothic Online

Zappa and the Wedding

by Kelle Groom

When you agree to marry for reasons other than love,
it's like working overtime, then falling down stairs
when you take out the garbage, catching your pinky toe
on the futon, snapping it wide, your soul breaking bone
after bone to get you to stop.

When you have three boyfriends during six weeks
in a detox hospital for alcoholic sailors (you do not sail),
and choose the bossiest one to marry, the one who disapproves
of your piercings, your yellow capris so tight you
look like a banana, the one who shields his face
as if you will transfix him with your vampire stare,

when he stands in the hall, feet apart in his underwear, solid
as the alphabet, he's the H of a dark house you could
live in, a D chord a dyslexic child could recognize by shape,
he's got a trailer for you in Jacksonville when he goes to sea.
You get off the wagon in a motel with free drinks.
He says, Maybe it'll be fun. But you can't drink in front
of him, leave your cup on the toilet tank, sneek sips. In fact,
when you drink,

you find you can't stand him. So when he appears
at your parents' house (your folks out of town), you have sex
on your pink canopy, and by eight p.m. on a Saturday night,
he's asleep, a big man whose body overtakes your single,
girl bed. So leave him a note, say you are taking cookies
to a sick friend, and go in search of the man you love.
Bill Bill bartender Bill

of the beautiful lank hair and many girlfriends.
He loves your back, loves when you sit on the kitchen
table drinking straight from the bottle. But in the bar
tonight, he's absent. You feel the scraped emptiness
of the place, cigarette wood, insect chatter, and see his friend, Zappa,
named for his Frito Bandito

mustache and hair, coffee sad eyes, lazy familiar--
there's nothing until morning when you see the white
of a sheet, and Zappa picking up the cup your contacts float
in, tossing it out the window, blue blue.
While you find only one lens in the grass, and have a difficult
time driving, your fiance will wake up, two weeks
before the wedding, walk out on you, and everyone will boo hoo,

canceling flights, blaming the sailor, wedding dress a ghost
in a closet of coats. But the soul kicks up her heels-she's free.

© 2005 Kelle Groom

Kelle Groom (Zappa and the Wedding, Lou Reed, the Reverend) lives in Orlando and was raised in Massachusetts, Hawaii, Texas, Spain, and Florida. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Florida Review, The New Yorker, Witness and elsewhere. Her collections of poems are Underwater City (University Press of Florida 2004) and Luckily (Anhinga Press 2006).