Wedding Album, 1967

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Posed stiff as the bride and groom
on the fourth tier of the iced-white cake,
you, trussed in a cummerbund beneath your black tails,
brown wavy hair hidden beneath a top hat,
me, cinch-waisted, barely able to take a quarter-breath.

Oh, here’s my mother in pink chiffon and a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat,
her hand on mine as if she hadn’t just snarled,
You’re a rotten daughter, rotten.

Now I’m pinning a boutonnière on my father’s lapel
while he mutters beneath a pasted-on grin,
We needed flowers for men, yet?

On this page my parents are together until death did them part.
You’ll be the death of me, she always told him.
You’ll live to dance on my grave, he’d reply.

And there’s your family, pinched-mouthed, unwelcoming.
Those tables of guests, the dance floor of fox-trotters,
most of them dead now.

The last page is you and me
silhouetted in a near-kiss. We should have floated
toward each other in ultramarine air like Chagall’s lovers,
me in your arms, holding a bouquet of wildflowers.

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro (@rjshapiro) is the author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) and Indie finalist Kaylee’s Ghost. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times (Lives) Newsweek, and more. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Moment, Entropy, The MacGuffin, The Iowa Review, and more. Her poems have been nominated for Best of The Net and this year’s Pushcart Prize. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

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