Terry Belew
​

For Certain
                      -For my friend B.R., murdered by his wife and her lover while taking out the trash.

I failed math in middle school
            because he showed me how Mentos
could be spit through a straw

            at the teacher—how algebra
was really an excuse to carve lyrics
            into a desk.

+

Someone I was certain
I would never leave gifted
me a slip joint
knife, but every time
I opened it my hand bled
and we split like skin
on an operating table.

+

This isn’t my story to tell,
            but it was skip day

in high school
            and everyone was high;

a teen girl told a teen boy
            she would fuck him if he swam
            across the river and back.

The cold crept into his quadriceps.
Their stoned smiles were swept away.
The divers snatched at the bottom.

+

The last time I spoke to him, we were ordering
            Chinese for our families near the town
we grew up in. We talked about playing music

            ten years ago, his rapping snare, double kick
drums, my Telecaster plugged into a now-sold
            half-stack, both of us trying and failing to stay in time.

+

If my wife
                                                            were to murder me,
                         I think it’d be with poison.

            Maybe. I don’t know.

Cyanide in the soup

                                                            a few nights in a row.

+

He didn’t know. He fought with his wife
            about money or children the night before
and maybe pictured a lover sealing her mouth

            with his mouth. He bagged his trash and headed
to the curb and knew, soon, he would sit at the table
            ​and have dinner with his son and daughter.
--
Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri and is a Poetry Editor for The Good Life Review. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Meridian, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, and Tar River Poetry, among many others