She was a delight at her school dances but an absolute terror at the salad bar / She cleaned & reupholstered her designer handbags every weekend & spent her husband’s money on shutting down fundraisers for causes she couldn’t understand / Her hair was always out of fashion but framed her face in ways that made the style almost worth it / Every other weekend she’d pay a yuppie a crisp $100 to snip a couple times & say they touched it up / Food trucks she didn’t like were driven out of business & the poor mime she used to harass at the farmers market was hit by a truck jay-walking away from her / Institutions crumbled beneath her pink kitten heels & locals learned to cross the street a block away from her semi-regular tantrums / She once tried speed dating on a singles cruise tailored to the divorced & two of her dates jumped overboard before the ship could dock / When she left her husband Mrs. Peacock Lane decided to get more involved in the community so she started the decoration subcommittee / It would become the child she would never have / She & her husband tried but it never worked & the renters who ran in & out of her house drove her mad / Lies about loving change dripped out of her mouth as she walked with The Dandies down the stairs to their unfinished basement where she found the roll top secretary with an old-fashioned lock that kept the panel shut / Go ahead / The Dandies offered her the key & when she saw their grief asleep inside a matchbox she wept / How unprepared we can become to watch another suffering so when the opportunity affords us we should always reach out instead of tearing down.
Ask Mrs. Peacock Lane to be grief’s godmother | The End
RJ Equality Ingram works as a used bookseller for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. Their first collection of poetry The Autobiography of Nancy Drew is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in early 2024. RJ received their MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California with concentrations in poetry & creative nonfiction. More work can be found in Phoebe Journal, Miniskirt Magazine & Citron Review among others. RJ’s cat Brenda lost a leg designing her memory palace.