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| Image source: Canadian Business |
You call up the stairs to tell me what we’ll need
to make it through the long night ahead.
The water’s running and I can hardly hear,
though you’re known to assert
that to listen and to hear were never meant to be the same.
No matter, we know this part always ends in a caustic, Nevermind.
I do hear you slam the door
and imagine your short sigh before heading off into your day.
I’m alone now and can make mine any way I’d like--
though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
for later when I get to the grocery
and this great forgetfulness is bound to come over me
surrounded by the bounty of America:
shelves stacked with goods, no one could ever use, given even a lifetime;
the produce shaped into so many pyramids
we’d once hoped to visit, but now know we never will;
the prepared foods, chilled, and ready to be reheated and consumed
but where should we put them if left uneaten when our day is done?
This is a great land with so many choices
of who to believe and why, and infinite possibilities of what to buy,
so please don’t berate me when I call
to ask what I need to bring.
I know we already have everything
and are likely still to feel we’ve been taken, and underserved,
and finally and fatally, misunderstood.
Though, Lordy, I hope there are tapes
of the long night so long ago when we first fell for each other.
Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.