Danielle Sellers
A Waiting Room in Kuwait
For my ex-husband
On the terrazzo floor, a sea
of soldiers in desert fatigues
using their packs as pillows,
snoring or flipping through magazines,
waiting for a flight home
or back to war. All of them
wanting to be anywhere but there.
Sitting in a metal folding chair
at a bank of outdated computers,
he finds me on MySpace.
I was a grad student
just beginning to publish.
I’ve thought of you often, he wrote.
I hadn’t thought of him in years.
But the library stacks were lonely,
and he was a safe 7,000 miles away.
What harm could there be
in giving him my number,
a home to call home to?
I'd seen the news. So many
everyones killed every day.
When he called, his voice was low,
deep, gentle, broken by static.
What harm could come?
Mine was only a minor territory,
Faulkner’s Mississippi postage stamp,
and I was a warm body the Army
could send a kill letter to.
July Fourth, 2008
For my ex-husband
Just over the Georgia border
you followed me and the baby
to a South Carolina Ramada Inn.
You entered with a promise
to never hit me again.
We made dinner plans
at a shack overlooking a swamp
that boasted live bluegrass
and the best fried gator tail
for miles. You were still angry
because I’d asked for a weekend
without your other daughter,
some time for our new family
to bond. I wanted to fuck
out in the open while the baby slept.
I wanted you to take me from behind,
which you never did, to bare
my breasts to the uncurtained
window, my bruised and anonymous
face pressed against the glass.
I wanted them to see.
Instead you told me I looked
like a pig with makeup on.
We went to dinner, watched
fireworks mirrored in still water.
I ordered the Fisherman’s Delight.
I think you felt a little bad
watching me eat every single solitary bite.
Passing Time in Père Lachaise, 2006
For Aaron
When my grandmother went the way
of all flesh, I flew to Paris on her dime,
where I received an email telling me
James, the quiet and brooding soldier
I was engaged to but didn’t love,
had been ambushed and shot in Iraq,
his condition unknown. It seemed
fitting, somehow, to find the cemetery
where ages of love have gone to die,
to search for the grave of the man
whose nocturnes my heart
used to hear each time you kissed me.
Oh Frédéric, why did you have to go
and write that opus, full of my grief
that never ends? Decades later
I’m left with nothing but préludes:
slow, kind, terribly short,
and two lilac-smelling grad students,
their feet bare in wet grass
throwing a frisbee they found
back and forth, back and forth
as if they had nothing but time.
“These three poems appear in my recently finished third manuscript titled The Book of Flames. The poems continue a theme explored in my second book, The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018), which expresses the difficult marriage the speaker had with an Army veteran of the Iraq war who came home changed, scarred, and often physically and verbally abusive. Leading up to and during the short life of this marriage, the speaker often found herself wistful for a former boyfriend whom she considers, even decades later, to be her true love.” —Danielle Sellers
Danielle Sellers is from Key West, FL. She has an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi where she held the John Grisham Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, The Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Bone Key Elegies (Main Street Rag 2009) and The Minor Territories (Sundress Publications 2018). She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.