Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Poli...

Closure

My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day.
I was there in the beginning, sat next to my grandmother,

in her teal blue dress and hot combed strands. As a rule,
she refused to appear unrefined. In a warm church in Trinidad,

a wedding evening in hurricane season, we wore our Sunday best,
my mother and I, in matching white lace and wide eyes.

Why shouldn’t this bond be marked by an angel with an arrow,
tasked to put an end to the sorrow of suffering alone

love meant to be shared. The sugar apples of my mother’s cheeks,
rouged more than the red carnation pinned to my father’s smokey

blue suit. I search his handsome jaw and boyish grin for clues. We keep
the happy secrets of these fleeting Trade winds, in the family album,

so old, the memory and the artifact have become one. Pigment sealed
to plastic for eternity, a reality that cannot be undone or loosened,

only destroyed. Marriage is a valentine that misses me
though I have imagined myself able to walk up the aisle,

if not back down it, which is partly why I am disappointed
when the court rescheduled without a reason. Perhaps

the judge on the docket, newly in love, refused to chance the karma
of divorce court. I can say it now, these years later,

I was eager to be asked to witness our legal dissolution.
The annihilation of vows that were broken. Tell me

what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,
or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.