Zero Eros
A man my age, with my looks,
should be flattered a woman
not my wife tells me she loves me.
It’s not that I find her unattractive,
acne scars pitting her cheeks,
dressed like a bag lady,
torn jeans and a burlap bag jumper;
not because I’m happily married,
part of the drama of a family,
somewhere in the second act, say,
the complications still developing.
More because I didn’t ask for this,
not a script of my own devising;
a love I simply can’t reciprocate,
I’m sorry.
Her face pops up like a jack-in-the-box,
springs into my life unwanted,
a distraction from the essential plot.
Can’t we just leave her as comic relief?
Punch and Judy, the entr’acte?
I didn’t ask her to come on stage.
But I don’t know how to direct her exit.
Covid Time
“For the first time in my life
I’ve started feeling old,”
my friend Linda lamented
to our virtual coffee klatch,
about a dozen of us on the internet,
a Wednesday morning virtual meeting.
She’d just turned seventy a few months before,
but still a vigorous and active person.
Only now, her son has forbidden her
from leaving her home, worried
she might pick up the virus,
even wearing a mask and keeping distance.
She’s been researching grocery-delivery services.
We’ve all been identified
as belonging to a vulnerable demographic;
some politicians believe we’re expendable,
not necessarily a bad thing if we died.
“I love Marty,” she reflects,
“but I’m not his child.
I don’t want him to worry,
but I still have to live my life, right?”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.
A man my age, with my looks,
should be flattered a woman
not my wife tells me she loves me.
It’s not that I find her unattractive,
acne scars pitting her cheeks,
dressed like a bag lady,
torn jeans and a burlap bag jumper;
not because I’m happily married,
part of the drama of a family,
somewhere in the second act, say,
the complications still developing.
More because I didn’t ask for this,
not a script of my own devising;
a love I simply can’t reciprocate,
I’m sorry.
Her face pops up like a jack-in-the-box,
springs into my life unwanted,
a distraction from the essential plot.
Can’t we just leave her as comic relief?
Punch and Judy, the entr’acte?
I didn’t ask her to come on stage.
But I don’t know how to direct her exit.
Covid Time
“For the first time in my life
I’ve started feeling old,”
my friend Linda lamented
to our virtual coffee klatch,
about a dozen of us on the internet,
a Wednesday morning virtual meeting.
She’d just turned seventy a few months before,
but still a vigorous and active person.
Only now, her son has forbidden her
from leaving her home, worried
she might pick up the virus,
even wearing a mask and keeping distance.
She’s been researching grocery-delivery services.
We’ve all been identified
as belonging to a vulnerable demographic;
some politicians believe we’re expendable,
not necessarily a bad thing if we died.
“I love Marty,” she reflects,
“but I’m not his child.
I don’t want him to worry,
but I still have to live my life, right?”
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books.
