There is Love that Throws You Through a Plate Glass Window and Then There is Love
by Dorothy Knight
I didn't understand my brother
until I asked about the bandage
on his knee and he told me
he kicked his girlfriend's cat,
so she threw him through the glass coffee table.
The look in his eyes got all dreamy;
he was smiling, and I
realized he needed the kind of woman
who could take a punch like a man,
who could survive being thrown
through a glass windshield when that red
Honda pulled out into an intersection
he had been drinking too much to slow for.
He had the right of way. He was on
the way to pick up his daughter
who died a year after that, swerving
to avoid a deer and colliding instead
with a tree. The family didn't want
his girlfriend to attend the funeral,
knowing she was prone to histrionics,
prone to leaving restaurants and commencing
the walk home alone down the highway
if he was too nice to the waitress serving
his sweet tea. My brother tended to leave
us all at the table to chase her
down the median, but he came
alone that day in his polyester suit
and stood next to his daughter's
boyfriend in marine dress blues,
to watch the release of
sixteen white balloons
into the sky.
Dorothy reads "There is Love that Throws You Through a Plate Glass Window..."
Dorothy Knight earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi last year. She is from Kingsland, GA, but now lives in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Salt Magazine and the Squaw Valley Review.