Season of the Queen

Filtered sunlight is pouring through the cages
Beneath Wal-Mart's skylights; I close my eyes
Anchored but shifting in this slow line
When a voice slips over my shoulder.

She loves the way hazelnuts taste in the snow.
They taste like lumber to her; she imagines
Devouring all the towns below us.

I glance back; he adjusts his tuxedo cuff,
Smiles--stiffly--reaches out,
Tap-dancing his fingernail
Along the rim of my Nutella.
His hands are empty but I smell roses,
Frost, the way a garden might, frozen
Beyond glass doors, apart from a ball.

She's never understood chocolate;
Too brittle by the time she swallows...
Nothing ever melts on her lips.

I nod. Some people just don't like chocolate,
Like some people shop in tuxedos, some in PJs.
I'm in shorts in the middle of December.
He stares at the bottles and boxes
Jerking down the conveyor, eyes dark.
It hits everyone, I think, in the line.
An existential question just before they're
Committed, supplies flowing toward check-out.

His voice shivers down my shoulders.
She's deposed but we're still getting married.
She doesn't call me Kay anymore...I miss it,
Oddly. You'd think love was being seen 
But with her love might have been 
Becoming frosted beneath her gaze
With all the dreams she's had since time
Woke starlight to rim the darkness 
Of her eyes. I was never Kay 
Except for her, in the cold.

When he smiles, I want to strike a match,
To light the mini candles in the shelves;
To commit votive arson for fear and fairy tales.

She didn't let me shop for years
But we're out of salt.

He sets a large blue box behind the Nutella.
I pay for it, goosebumps on my calves,
Telling myself the a/c is confused by seasons
Out of sequence, broken as rhymes in line
As he continues to speak of love
And the way the world might freeze
If she loved it half as much as him.

Sharing with Poets United and The Sunday Muse, image linked from The Sunday Muse. Hope everyone's December has begun as it should...it's 80 degrees just up the road from Houston and not feeling all that seasonal yet but the dogs are happy for the sunshine (they're converting it into nap-onium as we speak) and...yeah...that's the way the week begins. 

-- Chrissa