Her Last Lingering Lover

She looks out her window at the remnants of that year’s garden. Time, the banal paramour, runs its fingers through her ribcage into the heart she feeds an overflowing bowl of gruel. All the meager intentions of all the eager lovers she left coiled in the basement rot with a fragrance. That thinning stock perfuming her root cellar sticks to her skin like the eggs of flies.