Goodbye
I step out of the car; rose petals in the gravel.
She returned these in a small marble box
with a small rod of tourmaline.
She remembers them, the petals, as a memento
of my father’s funeral; I’ll let her.
What will I miss? Just the way she looked;
just the way she did things. She did me in
without regret or humility. I saw her and her lawyer
walking away, from the window in the stairwell
of the courthouse. I said, “Goodbye.”
I said, “Bread, milk, garbage bags.”
Ivars Balkits’ poems and prose have been most recently published in Anvil Tongue Radio, Harpy Hybrid Review, and Lotus Eater. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014.
See more of his work in 10.3