Until the Cows Came Home

by Mike Estabrook

image by Jennie Breeden

All the way home from Logan Airport this 42 year old woman (my wife's sister-in-law) played the license plate game:

there's Vermont, do we have Vermont? ooh there's Texas, we don't have Texas, write it down, hurry, Nicole, what about Washington, I don't think we have that one, & look there's Indiana, I know we have New York . . .

As I drove staring straight ahead at the road I strained to hear snatches of Beethoven on the radio & I wondered how I'd come to this place in time from so far away from my studies of Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch & Sophocles; Rembrandt, Mozart, Rodin & Michelangelo.

& I wondered too why I didn’t have any hair on my balls because if I did I’d kick her fat ugly ass out of my car right on the expressway here in the middle of Boston & let her tally-up those license plates until the cows came home until the fucking cows
came home.

About the Author
Well the 3 kids are gone, out on their own, but the wife is still here and the stupid dog and the computer and email so Mike Estabrook will write on, to what end he is not sure, but write on he will; still trying to get into the best poetry journals possible, both online and otherwise, and hoping to publish a real book of poems, called A Superlative Woman, about my superlative wife, one of these days.


Illustration by Jennie Breeden 


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