all the years my husband and before him, a pre-husband I suppose
we travelled within our known territories and beyond our imaginations
checking into lodgings, tenuously straddling a crabbed sink area. I with dread to share my
assemblage of decommissioned cosmetics, hair accoutrements, and all things feminine
demanding footprint, having to relinquish minimal space for the leather envelopment of
virility: the Dopp Kit.
within the Dopp Kit always existed an atavism of past heroics (an expression of the male
“getting lucky” talisman perhaps) and potentiality of opportunities to be exploited,
serendipitously presented itself,
a condom. just one.
ready to burst, inflate into a calliope of penis rising.

It still exists
nestled among the Mennen’s, hairbrush, dental floss, and other manly things, but more
recently crowded by vials of pramipexole, rasagiline, and other mouth-utterance defying
substances.
settling him into rehab last June to recover from another pneumonia, another fall: this is
fourth maybe fifth; I placed his personal effects onto another cramped sink (sans my
beauty bar) and thus the Dopp Kit, seizing the available real estate, spread its zippered maw
of partitions to reveal this singular condom, standing foiled, moist, and at the ready