For The Last Forty-Two Years Poem by Charles Chaim Wax

Edna Ash had not permitted
her husband Harvey
to step foot in the living room.
In fact she didn’t allow her daughter
to step foot in either.
I don’t know what the living room
represented to her,
perhaps a pristine showcase for furniture,
but Harvey never disputed her command.
And now he never would.
Dead.
And the daughter barely alive
having just suffered her fourth
nervous breakdown
watching her father’s face
turn blue
as he toppled helplessly from a chair
near an open window
in the kitchen.