Elizabeth Skurnick
“My Husband is a Homosexual”
from Check-In

We were always older than the parents of her friends.
     Dorinda bore it mildly, practiced Czerny in the room off the kitchen—
When I was a girl it was Hindemith.
     Clay is amazed at my recall for obsolescence:
Not the odor of digitalis but the disinfectant on the street car.
     He is my largest living artifact.
I snatched him from 1952, stuffed him full of sofa cushions
     And here he sits, a husband in constant repose.
His is the same soft face I used to stroke,
     Grown no harder with the years but silky, pores shining—
I could clot it like a handful of tissue.
     The Sonaten drift into the kitchen. Twice a day,
The ashes are disrupted, the flame is brought
     To the pyre, and smoke drifts over our wreckage.
When I was a girl, the wealthy were always in Biarritz.
     Now we get a house in the mountains, expand our lungs
With the essence of timber. “Take deep breaths,
     It’ll do you good.” Over the years, I have understood.

Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book we publish to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with such precision and power that it feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix:

Copyright 2003-2006 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to literature revert to their respective authors.
ISSN 1547-6839.

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