The lady lays a quarter on the card table
An autocratic offer for an antiquated edition
of Betty Crocker basics
Betty and I go back to my bridal shower
The book is more than a two-bit buy
I say to the Saturday morning insult
Bittersweet menus from a first marriage
flavoring my bargaining ability
But she's already thrashing through
a throng of scarves
Separating silk wheat from synthetic chaff
Faint whiffs of Ambush fragrance
trapping memories with olfactory talons
That drop me on a Montana farm
Where a fourteen-year-old dabs her first perfume
Reverie interrupted when the skinflint
singles out six scarves and says they stink
So will I settle on fifty cents for the stack
Ambush isn't manufactured anymore
so the smell is collectible I contend
As her son in one sadistic twist
separates a jewelry box from the ballerina
that once danced my daughter to sleep
And Mr. Scrooge caresses a 22-caliber rifle
Wants to know its past before he purchases
As if a possible heinous act
might haunt him posthumously
But I'm the one besieged by effigies
Of a deer carcass swinging from a barn ceiling
And a father queuing tin cans on a fence
before he teaches his daughter a soft trigger touch
Just the image I need to open fire
With verbal violence aimed inward
Vengeance for pricing my past
Pardon possible when I post a sign saying
Former Lives Free For All
And I leave the nettling family
To negotiate the here and now
To meet the future halfway

First published by PWJ Publishing. 
Used with the author's permission.