by Cecil Morris
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
I remember breaking up with my first real girlfriend,
the one who surprised me with earthly delights
and let me touch the promised land, again and again,
the one who did not push my hands away as if
they were impertinent puppies, maybe cute
but mostly annoying. I loved everything about her,
her hair on my skin, her mouth, her own wild eagerness,
her eyes turned up to me, the way we enjoyed
the American River on sun-burnished afternoons,
even how she dropped the great, immovable river rock
on my naked heart and made me beg and cry
and empty myself in stupid, sprawling letters.
I thought she loved me and then she didn’t love me.
That was almost 50 years ago—1976—
and this is it again exactly, another love
rejecting me, lifting her marbled foot and stepping
on me with all the gorgeous, colonnaded tons
of her, repulsing my advances, saying keep
your nasty science off of me and covering
her liberal titty. Her voice, that smile and kiss
of democracy, has turned to bray and bawls
and claims that I misunderstood, that she
doesn’t even know me. And, again, I am left
in tears to beg my heart’s case in postcards
and signs, my own voice now raw with the ache
of what I thought I had and now have lost.
Please, America, please. Please come back to me.
the one who surprised me with earthly delights
and let me touch the promised land, again and again,
the one who did not push my hands away as if
they were impertinent puppies, maybe cute
but mostly annoying. I loved everything about her,
her hair on my skin, her mouth, her own wild eagerness,
her eyes turned up to me, the way we enjoyed
the American River on sun-burnished afternoons,
even how she dropped the great, immovable river rock
on my naked heart and made me beg and cry
and empty myself in stupid, sprawling letters.
I thought she loved me and then she didn’t love me.
That was almost 50 years ago—1976—
and this is it again exactly, another love
rejecting me, lifting her marbled foot and stepping
on me with all the gorgeous, colonnaded tons
of her, repulsing my advances, saying keep
your nasty science off of me and covering
her liberal titty. Her voice, that smile and kiss
of democracy, has turned to bray and bawls
and claims that I misunderstood, that she
doesn’t even know me. And, again, I am left
in tears to beg my heart’s case in postcards
and signs, my own voice now raw with the ache
of what I thought I had and now have lost.
Please, America, please. Please come back to me.
Author’s note: The epigraph comes from Chris Banks, a line in his long poem “Core Samples of the Late-Capitalist Dream” in Alternator, Nightwood Editions, 2023. I borrowed the “liberal titty” and the imagery and language of the line “Her voice, that smile and kiss / of democracy” from e. e. cumming’s “Thanksgiving (1956)”
Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025. He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.
