A Picnic Remembered

1. Evidence

The day after his arrest, he told a fellow inmate
he had researched ways to dispose of a body in acid.
The guards found his list of three possible reasons
for her blood to have been in his trunk.

With the discovery of the blood,
my colleague--who sat with me at graduation
in full regalia, who joked with me as we walked
through the campus ravine, and was widely supported
for promotion--was charged with murdering his wife.

A mushroom hunter found her bones in a ditch.
More evidence was collected:
The smell of gunpowder led to the weapon
in the attic. The blood he thought he had
scrubbed away had pooled in a crevice.

2. His Family

I had seen the family months before she went missing,
seated under the shelter at the department picnic.
His wife and five-year-old were wearing top knots,
their heads bent together over a plate of potato chips,
her cellphone with its recorded fights out of sight.

He was sitting across from them, looking away,
indifferent to the child who displayed
his father’s jug ears. The hand wearing the wedding band
rested on one knee; the other was cupped on the table.
He had left his brass knuckles at home.

Gaby Bedetti is Professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University. Her poems, photos, and translations have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Typehouse, Los Angeles Review, New Delta Review, and World Literature Today. She is assembling a co-translation of the selected poems of Henri Meschonnic. Visit her at https://gabriellabedetti.wordpress.com/.