James Benger
Comfort
Some nights, when they’re
fighting in the kitchen,
or shouting in the living room,
or when one of them screams
and leaves the trailer for the night,
or when they do that weird
we like each other again thing
in the back bedroom,
he takes his small bowl of ice cream,
hard won: you have to heat the spoon up
forever under the hot water
to chop through all the freezer burn,
and he sits on the concrete blocks
just outside the flimsy door,
and he watches the sky change its mind
on whether it’s day or night.
Most of these evenings,
the ice cream goes nearly untouched;
it’s not really about that,
it’s about finding any kind of
comfort in all of this instability.
Every now and then, that dog,
the one without a name, or at least
no name anyone can remember,
he shuffles over to the boy on blocks,
sits, and rests a paw on the boy’s
exposed skinned knee, and looks up
in a plea or in friendship or most likely,
a sickeningly sad shade of the two.
On those evenings, the boy removes
the now frozen spoon from the bowl,
and sets it all on the dirt in front of the dog.
The boy watches the dog devour
their shared dessert, ice cream on muzzle,
and then they both watch the sky,
not sure if they’re hoping for clouds
or clear skies, or maybe simply
something other than this.
Other work by James Benger