by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried
Dear Beatles fans,
You may picture me as a saucer-eyed flower
child with golden hair and thigh-high skirts.
I’m eighty now, a lot more covered, a lot more knowing—
yet I still don’t understand why George
soured on me. In “Something,” the song
he wrote for me, he said I don’t need no other
lover, but that was a lie. You should know—
like picking bon bons from a gift box, he slept
with any girl he fancied. Until he slept with Ringo’s
wife in our mansion—
yes, I caught them in a bedroom.
Eric, my second husband, pursued me for years,
wrote “Layla” for me. But he, too, couldn’t keep
his sex in his pants. And he drank.
When he had a child
with his Italian lover, while I was trying
to have a child with him,
I had to go. Demolished.
My womb refused to flower for either spouse.
Reading their letters now, thinking
how they trashed my love, is it any wonder
I’m selling these reminders?
Old age is expensive.
The doctor visits, the tests, the treatments—
Once I was a sylph with the palest skin and hair,
too naive to demand more alimony
from two multi-millionaires
who slayed the world with their guitars.
Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Consequence, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Sparks of Calliope.