Interlanguage Fossilization

For Thanksgiving I burnt the gravy
on purpose so you would go
to work without saying goodbye.
After you’d gone, I sat with a dog
that I’d stolen, thinking it our neighbor’s.
It wasn’t, and I ignored his face
on the telephone poles. You thought
he was a stray. We gave him a new name.
We, the dog and I, waited to baste the bird,
wondering what it was that made
the breast brown; wondering how we,
me and you, would make it to Christmas.
When I boxed up the leftovers, it felt
like emergency aid, a last-ditch effort
in a war-torn country, a lifeline pulsating
into our tangled tendrils as we sought
transitional idiosyncrasies to prop up
a ceiling that had been falling all around
for a very long time. We ate with our fingers
in the lobby of a retirement home. I forgot
the forks, though I can’t say for certain
that it wasn’t out of spite. Our conversation
staled, but I was pleased by your lips,
then imagined one of us had something to say,
reaching for mashed potatoes when they clung
like saran wrap. There were no stars that night,
but I still wished I was a polyglot. So even on
the threshold, I was no closer to parsing out
the meaning of your eyebrows than I had been
when we started. We kissed, a perfunctory thing,
and then the doors came between us. We mouthed
goodbye as the latch locked shut.



Bailey Merlin Contributor
Bailey Merlin holds an MFA in fiction from Butler University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Crack the Spine, Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk, The Indianapolis Review, Anomaly Literary Journal, among others. She lives and writes in Boston, MA.

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