When I return from writing the morality keynote at the Republican Convention, I find my love dolls converted into revolutionaries, sitting in the kitchen, drinking green tea with ginseng and eating oysters and portobello omelets. Svetlana hands me a list of demands signed by all the dolls. The commie says they’ve divvied the chores among themselves and that I’m free to sleep in the basement if I pay the bills and leave them to their pleasures. Aora and Siobhan feed each other strawberries and slivers of kiwi only Lupe could have sliced. Svetlana will walk the dog and Sister Veronica will mow the yard. They assigned themselves full custody of the remote controls, and I can buy the music they select. Bollywood soundtracks. The Annie DiFranco boxed set. Lupe’s Mexican love songs. They tossed my porn collection into three trash bags for the garbagemen tomorrow. A League of Their Moan. The Devil in Miss Jones. My Priya Rai and Tera Patrick collections. The dog lays against Aora’s chair, chewing the last of the bacon and staring at me as if I were hambone marrow. The list goes on. No more singing the chorus from “Born in the USA” in the shower. My Paradise-on-a-Hanger shirts banished to the trash bags, except for the Highway 66 collectible and the Magnum, P. I. replica Sister Veronica wants. No more Tokyo vacations to visit the love doll brothels. I make myself scarce when they entertain gentlemen. I’ll have to resign from the Optimists’ Club. Siobhan suggests I spend my time reading the Irish and Spanish poets. I’m too bourgeois for the poems of Mother Russia. I won’t be the only delegate alone in his basement, nursing a scotch with his Wall Street Journals. All my alpha-male pals will start sleeping solo tonight.
Michael Brockley is a 63-year old school psychologist who has worked in special education in rural northeast Indiana for 25 years. He has poetry publications in Wind, The Windless Orchard, Spitball, The Indiana Review, The Indiannual, The Spoon River Quarterly, The River City Review and The Ball State Literary Forum. Tom Koontz' Barnwood Press published his chapbook Second Chance in 1990, and he has lately placed work in Indiana publications such as Maize, Country Feedback, Flying Island, The TIpton Poetry Journal and Facing Poverty. A video of Mike reading his "Hollywood's Poem" which was published in Facing Poverty can be found on YouTube. His poem "When the Woman in the White Sweater at the Cancelled Charles Simic Reading Asked If I Was David Shumate" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Barry Harris of the Tipton Poetry Journal.
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