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.

TEAR GAS AND WOAD

by Peleg Held

A nude protester—dubbed later “Naked Athena"—faces off against law enforcement officers during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Ore., on July 18. Credit Nathan Howard/Reuters via The New York Times.

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem. —Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars


She fingers the blue on slowly, feralled in its wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the tea cup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the cunt-directed state.

Caesar may misread you in the peripherals of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.


Peleg Held lives in Hiram, Maine with his partner and 21 chickens led by the world's tiniest rooster, Gavroche-That-Lives.