"A Taste of Things to Come"

I'm not saying that I'm trying to do a poem everyday because then I'll jinx myself. So I'm just saying I'm trying to write something frequently. But in exciting news, I just received another acceptance letter from South Carolina Review for my poem "Delivery". So now I need to write more stuff before I get it all published.

Later EDIT: I realized I had left out a sarcastic comment I had originally attached to that last sentence and Valerie pointed out that without it, I sound like a real jerk. So here is the truth to that statement. If I keep publishing, which is awesome, I will eventually run out of good poems and have a hard drive full of garbage. So my greatest incentive right now is to not run out of poems I'm proud of and want to get published.

Also, after thinking about this poem all day, I"m probably going to hack this one up into two, maybe three poems.

Tastes

His house was a fridge of beer, bbq, and ketchup,
the family sized jug of Tabasco set like a vase through every dinner.
We didn’t understand Marlboro had seared his tongue into a steak
little more than a speech muscle.
So there were two kinds of food to us –
Mom food, sufficient in itself
and Dad food, a meal made for salting or dipping.
One breakfast on an “every other weekend”,
we tasted spoiled milk. When we told him,
he gave it a chug from the carton. It was fine, all in our heads.
What a divorce cliché to cry through a meal at Dad’s,
but we hiccupped through every sour spoonful.
And we loved going out though it meant a bar
that served Mexican food hot enough for him to taste.
We never suspected dinner beers like he never thought
of second hand smoke. It was another way things were
and we didn’t stop to ask how life was wrong.
Even on the drive home when he’d crunch a curb
or drive us superfast like there were no cops on earth
we’d look out the limited glass of his Pontiac,
see all our stars and say that we have two cities
when most kids have one. Which made us the lucky,
and not the broken. And how must he have thought,
pushing concentration through the cloud of hops,
that maybe these weren’t his kids, just a friend’s,
and he’d drop them off, head back to the bar,
where he could be loved, not divorced but rather new.