Michelle Bitting

 

                     Take-out Fantasy

 

Your husband finds a piece of newspaper in his mu shu pork and informs you he wants to take it back. “Let’s not spoil our evening, honey,” you say, offering to eat the tainted portion yourself. “After all, no one ever died from eating a little paper,” you add, but he is hell-bent on having his dinner cooked over so you say, “Fine, I’ll go!” grabbing the keys, the half-empty carton, and making sure to slam the door on your way out, little blue flames of contention sparking at your heels as you go. In the car you play loud music and blaze through intersections, your thoughts jumping around inside your head like monkeys on speed until they settle on the image of a man across town, sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant, an empty chair facing him with your name on it, and suddenly you are there in velvet and pearls, the bell of your hips swinging past islands of pink linen and exploding centerpieces as you make your fabulous way through the polished crowd to the man who will save you from it all, only, just as you reach him you notice he’s reading a newspaper and eating egg rolls, the tapered ends of a pair of chopsticks resting on his lower lip like two thoughtful fingers that make you think of the man at home, how right now he’s probably reaching down to brush a curtain of hair from the face of a child drunk with sleep while the dishwasher hums a love-song into the night, a bowl of unopened fortune cookies waiting for you on the other side of the door.

 

 

 

---

Michelle Bitting has work forthcoming or published in Glimmer Train, Swink, Prairie Schooner, Small Spiral Notebook, Nimrod, The Southeast Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Poetry Southeast, Slipstream, Dogwood, Salt Hill, Pearl, Rattle, and others. She has won the Glimmer Train, Rock & Sling, and Poets On Parnassus Poetry Competitions. Formerly a dancer and a chef, she teaches children and is a devoted outreach worker. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Phil Abrams, an actor. They have two children, Elijah and Vera Rose. Last summer, Michelle attended the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference and in June 2006, will commence work on an MFA at Pacific University in Oregon.