Tonight's Poet Corner: Do You Know The Kellers?
Do You Know The Kellers? by Belinda Roddie He holds her hand - stiff fingers, starchy, like leftover rice in heat. All the way through dinner, he does this. She cannot lift her fork. She cannot slice her steak. It sits like a stone slab in front of her, inscribed with the Ten Commandments. She listens to the stories told by an idiot in a bow tie. He opines with the timbre and smile of a bellowing jack-o-lantern. If pumpkins could laugh and be pompous, then the man is a pro at the awkward antithesis of a grinning tableau. She remembers when she met his wife, a beautiful nymph with grass woven in her curls. Snake bites decorated her calves, and still, she knew how to dance. Now her ankles are bound, and her teeth are whittled into pearls, and her lover compliments the bland potatoes, which feel softer in her mouth than her husband's knuckles turning into petrified pulp under the Kellers' orange tablecloth.