It was not the moment when the first shells
were fired from the assault rifle
at the small Massachusetts college,
two of which tore through the legs
of her fifteen-year-old son.
Nor was it the next two days when she
sat at home with her younger son while
her husband sat hospital bedside feeling
useless as their fifteen-year-old son slid 
in and out of morphine fueled drams.
It was not the moment when her son
told her he wanted to go back to the college
for that was where he belonged, not at home,
despite her pleas and her husband agreed
it was the right place for their son.
It was not the moment when the friend,
always followed by a small cloud 
of mystery, smiled at her across the table
and she thought, or perhaps imagined,
there was something more to the gaze,
and then she saw her husband watching.
Guilt and anger are twinned emotions
easily turned into a psychic cancer
that grows slowly, one which
must be projected on another
to avoid succumbing 
to their ever-leeching poison.
They fester nonetheless,
often slowly, until it is
too late, and what once was
collapses leaving only ruins.

---

Louis Faber is a poet and writer. His work has appeared in several anthologies and in The MacGuffin, Cantos, Alchemy Spoon, New Feathers Anthology, Flora Fiction, Dreich (Scotland), Prosetrics,  Atlanta Review,  Glimpse, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been twice nominated for a Best of the Web and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.