After you died, I woke up next to him.
Wait
That ain’t right.
That’s a little bittersweet, actually
and I remember it being worse than that.
After you died, I let him put his hands up my skirt.
Well
it weren’t that nasty, but that’s in
the right ballpark.
After you died, I
Hell. What did I do again?
It’s hell on a poet
trying to rip off a
great line from another.
After the game we were
a little brittle from the cold,
but “What Is and What Should Never Be”
scritching along on vinyl in the next room
warmed us up more than Busch ever could.
She said she has a new poem, but
everyone told her to lose the first line.
“What is it,” I mumble
as Ed swaps the record player to the Jam.
In the city there’s a thousand things
I want to say to you.
“It’s too crass, I guess,” she says, and
I say there’s not much of such a thing
in the twenty-first century.
After you died, I slept with your husband,
she says,
and I’ve got that taste at the back of my throat,
like you made the Kool-Aid with too much sugar,
it’s good, too good
it’s cherry-limeade plus,and the extra calories
are scraping down the back of your neck,
like this one time I got a lemonade at Toomer’s Corner in
Auburn, and it was simultaneously too sweet
and too sour, and so
perfect.
After you died, I slept with your husband,
I roll it around in my mouth like a Jawbreaker
at a teenage baseball game.
“No good, huh?”
You say, and I think
Of a thousand terrible suburban weekends,
at least two dozen Ellen Gilchrist short story
collections (signed at Lemuria
on two dozen Labor Day weekends), not to mention
just the pure blunt sadness of it, a wondrous balance
between memory and loss, and
It’s so good I’m going to steal it.