April 7: You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?
Martha
You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?
Elizabeth Acevedo
it’s the being alone, i think, the emails but not voices. dominicans be funny, the way we love to touch — every greeting a cheek kiss, a shoulder clap, a loud.
it gots to be my period, the bloating, the insurance commercial where the husband comes home after being deployed, the last of the gouda gone, the rejection letter, the acceptance letter, the empty inbox.
a dream, these days. to work at home is a privilege, i remind myself.
spend the whole fucking day flirting with screens. window, tv, computer, phone: eyes & eyes & eyes. the keys clicking, the ding of the microwave, the broadway soundtrack i share wine with in the evenings.
these are the answers, you feel me? & the impetus. the why. of when the manicurist holds my hand, making my nails a lilliputian abstract,
i close my fingers around hers, disrupting the polish, too tight i know then, too tight to hold a stranger, but she squeezes back & doesn’t let go & so finally i can.
==
(Published in 2018. I love when poems seem eerily prescient, or take on a whole new resonance.)
Today in:
2020: Let Me Begin Again, Philip Levine
2019: Hammond B3 Organ Cistern, Gabrielle Calvocoressi
2018: Siren Song, Margaret Atwood
2017: A Sunset, Ari Banias
2016: Coming, Philip Larkin
2015: The Taxi, Amy Lowell
2014: Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana, Joe Hutchison
2013: The Last Night in Mithymna, Linda Gregg
2012: America [Try saying wren], Joseph Lease
2011: Boston, Aaron Smith
2010: How Simile Works, Albert Goldbarth
2009: Crossing Over, William Meredith
2008: The World Wakes Up, Andrew Michael Roberts
2007: Hour, Christian Hawkey
2006: For the Anniversary of My Death, W.S. Merwin
2005: The Last Poem About the Snow Queen, Sandra M. Gilbert