POEM OF THE WEEK: SAMUEL HUGHES

Samuel Hughes

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The Detective’s Wife

                   “Nobody is ever missing”

I used to dream that it was him slouched down
in the car at the end of the road, old coat pulled up
around his ears, hat down, sunglasses mirrored.

And it was me that would get close enough
to see his eyes, the circles under them,
the rings of Saturn, gritty bricolage,

to touch the endless nicotine attention
painted yellow on his fingers, to smell
the bitter liquors that would keep him watching.

I used to dream he’d have some tragedy
in back of him: first wife, botched case, dead child
—some alibi for where his heart had been.

In his apartment he’d have it all mapped out,
the bags of earth and ash, the lock of hair
I’d hope was mine, the fingerprints, a list

of names, newspapers from that year, a knife,
a nail, receipts, transcripts, the photographs,
all pinned up on the walls, with frayed red twine

running spiderwise between the tacks;
a plaster bootprint for a doorstop. I’d dream
that I’d be too endeared to be afraid.

I’d work it out so far that I would know
how sick I’d get eventually of hearing
all his cop show lines: Murder will out,

Murder gnaws at the soul. My job, he’d say,
is knowing what no one else wants to, where tic
bleeds over into act. The pedophiles

he’d say, keep to themselves. The ones who look
like thugs just look that way. You can never tell.
By then I’d know that he at least could not.

And I would dream that what if it was me:
would he be able to tell then? I’d dream
I knew what it was like to kill, no worse

than what I dreamed of being married, the way
you’d think about it for a while, or not,
and then one day it’s done, and no one else

knows how, though love’s what’s easiest to say.
I’d plant the evidence, the knife, the nail,
under his pillow, send in paste-up letters

to the station, sit up nights to mark him
with my incriminating DNA
when he would come home wild-eyed after midnight.

And still I dream he’s going through my trash,
my drawers, my bag, my pockets, phone, collecting
furtively my fingerprints, my blood,

tracking my movements, mapping them out in twine,
waiting for me to slip, watching, seeing,
knowing—hell—something—me—something

I wouldn’t have to say for once, something
I didn’t know myself—what my crime was,
—Don’t we all have one?—why I’m not fit

for society—what else is love for?
For years, I’ve dreamed the same dream every night.
For years, he hasn’t gotten any closer.

 

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Samuel Hughes is a Tennessean in Vermont. He is currently working towards his degree from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He was a finalist for Arts and Letters’ Rumi Prize for Poetry in 2019 and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology in 2018; in 2017, he received a Staff-Artist Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Outside of Pleiades, his work appears in Rattle, Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, and occasionally on Instagram at @samhugheslives.