by Marybeth Rua-Larsen
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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss—
a felon in the White House—yet you, my knight,
ride in. I wouldn’t think to call it bliss
with tensions at a high-pitched, python hiss
in news reports: so many crimes. Indict!
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss,
and you distract me as we reminisce
about our kids, the work we love, hold tight
to us, and still, I couldn’t call it bliss
when daughters, sons, so young, are stuck with this:
his lies, the vitriol he spews, the spite.
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss.
You vow we’ll move to Portugal, dismiss
the obstacles of language, passports, flight,
the cost. Is now the time to call it bliss?
A lunatic— his head ballooned with hubris—
rouses me to stand, to choose to fight.
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss,
but I have you. I will. I’ll call it bliss.
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts and works in her hometown library as Head of the Reference department. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, Orbis, Crannóg, Eclectica Magazine and American Arts Quarterly, among others. She won the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and was accepted into Marge Piercy’s Summer Poetry Intensive in Wellfleet. She is a member of the Powow River poets, and her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.
