The Happy Hour by Mignon Ariel King

For an hour each night, the children bathed
and bedded down with stuffed bunnies and Pooh,
she lay white-nightied in the chirping dark to wonder
if her husband were alive, whiskey-soured and darting
or in the literal gutter instead, with motorcycled men lit blue
in flashes, attempting to identify grey matter, teeth, bone, glasses
splattered, shattered, sharding the pavement, guard rail, trees and grass.
Then the drone of exhausted rubber, airless on asphalt, ended the hour again.

Mignon Ariel King was born and raised to be an English teacher, but she has been AWOl for about five years now, working 9 to 5, finishing an autobiographical trilogy which includes her first published collection (The Woods Have Words), reading at open-mics, and editing two online journals (MoJo! and U.M.Ph.! Prose).