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Spaghetti Dinner in a Storm
by William Doreski

All day the sky looked ceramic.
Breathing seemed a hopeless chore.
Now as we boil spaghetti
thunder expresses great disdain
and the electric power fails,

casting the kitchen full of gray.
Why do I remember the closet
in that vacant South End townhouse
where the rubble of my student,
murdered by unknown subject, lay?

That horror forty years ago
flashes as I watch the rain comb
the back yard, feeling its way
across the world. He strangled her
for a moment of loveless sex,

the same dry story everyone
tells everyone else whenever
they want the wood to shift. We douse
our spaghetti with vodka
and tonic and hope the mixture

doesn’t explode. Every year the storms
threaten more effectively, stirring
the mud at the bottom of ponds
and evolving new shades of gloom.
I don’t know how I knew that child

lay rotting in that closet two miles
south of Beacon Street where last seen
hitchhiking toward Kenmore Square.
But some cosmic sense of drama
drew my attention to that house

and I insisted police search it.
When they refused I found her myself,
glass and plaster gnashing underfoot.
Lightning unsheathes as we eat
in the dusk. The storm means nothing;

but its show of force in sorting
positive from negative ions
may resurrect the famous dead
in a silver mist of particles
too fine for the eye to resolve.