The Governor’s staff does not know where he is.
He left a country where getting along
with pedestrian things
like a wife,
pork barrels and pigs,
and running a state,
seemed boringly wrong;
Some place else becked his call,
at first sight,
one of great exotic,
erotic,
delight;
an Argentinian smack-of-the-lips
to ignite
his very insides.
But when he got there,
was the cupboard so bare?
he so hung in mid-air?
that he had nowhere to go
but home?
(to the crux of a wife
who’d already said
get out of my life).
So he'd sigh, blubber and cry
for himself;
a cock horse in a desolate farmyard,
suspended between home and Argentina.
Barbara Lightner is a 70-year old shameless agitator, retired. After a career of community organizing and teaching at university, she turned her hand to poetry. As a bookshop owner, she sponsored poetry readings, and published chapbooks of local poets in Milwaukee, WI. Her poetry has previously appeared in New Verse News; Poesia and Table Rock Review; as well as in Letters to the World, an anthology of women’s poetry.
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