Saturday, March 16, 2024

THE PATTIE BOYD COLLECTION AT CHRISTIE’S

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.