After Sunday School I threw up breakfast
behind our portable classroom like it
was sin, my breakfast I mean, Sugar Smacks
and Tang, but at least I managed to keep
it all in until we said Amen to
the Lord’s Prayer. But Miss Hooker heard me
outside the building, the walls are pretty
thin, and watched me finish giving it up
and didn’t say a word until I stopped,
God bless her, because then it might’ve been
tough for me to get the demons out. She’s
my Sunday School teacher. If I’m ever
going to marry her one day I can’t
afford to be caught throwing up like that
unless it’s the flu or a virus and
in that case she can take care of me while
I drift in and out of life and death in
our bed, which we’ll share because we’ll be one,
married that is, and I think it’s the law
except in reruns of old TV shows
way back when the world was black and white.
I wonder when it turned to color? So
when I was finished with vomit and spit
I turned around to find her there looking
sorry for me like I do my dog when
he eats some grass and then wretches. I say
Poor thing and he wags his tail and I feel
his nose to see if it’s cold and that’s how
I know if he’s better and so does he.
I lead him to his water dish and he
drinks, I guess to get the bad taste out. Then
we lie in the shade together and he
sleeps and sometimes I do, too, and last time
I dreamed about Miss Hooker as my wife
and this time she was sick but I nursed her
back to health, or nearly—she died on me
right there in our bed. So I cried and cried
and then called the cops to say Miss Hooker’s
dead—what happens now? But they just bowed and
wowed, which woke me upright out of my dream
to see my dog chasing squirrels again
though not on the branches, no dog’s that good.
Then Miss Hooker patted me on the head
and brought me in for a cup of water,
which I drank like I’d been in the desert
forty days and nights. And it was righteous.
About Gale Acuff
Gale Acuff has had poems published in many journals and has also authored three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine. Gale now teaches literature at Sichuan University for Nationalities, in China.
