Tom is dull
He doesn’t know
dirty gasoline can’t clean very well
He washed his grease stained pants
in a plastic pail filled with dregs
from an oil can
You can’t say he was wrong
The pants lost their stains
Perhaps he knew
the results
before wanting our advice
and getting it
like the time he asked
eight times
how to roast a chicken
and gave up
To place it in the oven
and wait two hours
overwhelmed him
He even paid Carol to do it
though he was nearly broke
Perhaps that’s normal behavior
for a man trained to be cooked for
Still, something was wrong
The way he vanished,
made us suspect it wasn’t
simply a matter of low intelligence
We recalled, then, his friend Jack
who never looked you in the eye
as he pumped for information
acting drunker than he was
and Tom’s wide eyed adulation
when he spoke of his hero
a brother who was in jail
Still, we didn’t think it strange
that he lost his job
the day after moving in with us
Like the money he didn’t have to fix his teeth
and how he planned to burglarize a house
so that he’d be sent to prison
“They had good dentists there,” he said
Published Naugatuck Review August 2016