Unfaithful
by Randy Koch
Put down the bottle. You’ve had enough
of her and she of you. It’s not unusual,
no more so than finding a stream of ants
hiking single-file across the chipped ledge of
the window overlooking the playground
and the suspicious odor following her from
the dark outside the door to her withheld
past. It hung there, almost motionless, like
a hovering moth, a flock of motes in angled
sunlight, a hawk over a wind-rustled ditch
before dropping as if released by a puppeteer.
Tip the box and check the dice. Three of a
kind? Small straight? Back down and slide
it across the table. Take your time rolling up
your sleeves and squeezing the lime in your
beer. There’s no hurry. Never has been.
All that really matters left town long ago.
And, as expected, no one pursued, no one
complained, no one noticed. So it’s back to
the way things were before the denial. Back
to the peeled labels and catapulted bottle
caps. To the round table rummaging through
repeated rumors and failed hustles. Down
to the 3-day drunks and a .12-gauge hang-
over, the kind that cleaves open the dis-
appointment of flirtation and that long-ago
massacre of Muscovy ducks, their bodies
scattered in that Sunday morning sermon
and the feather-jowled dog led to the middle
of the plowed field and left in a dead
furrow to keep a .22 shell company.
Repeat the minister’s insinuation about
remembering the Sabbath to keep it wholly
irrelevant the other 6 days of the week.
Repeat. Repeat.
Randy Koch is the author of four collections of poems: Composing Ourselves (Fithian Press, 2002), This Splintered Horse (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and forthcoming in 2026, both Against the Risen Flesh (Alternating Current Press) and Amends (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Chiricú Journal, The Texas Observer, Revista Interamericana, Sundial Magazine, and many others. A longtime columnist for LareDOS: A Journal of the Borderlands, he earned an MFA at the University of Wyoming and twice has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
