Maureen Sherbondy (3 poems)
Erase
We have erased the others,
those men, those women
who came before us,
the smeared kisses
in hallways, the neck nibbles
in cars, the bar-room tiffs
and alley seductions.
The all alone of Friday nights,
long evenings in front of screens
not being watched,
listening for phone calls
that never arrive.
I has shifted to we
like that old house
where the owner bulldozed
all interior walls
to create one giant room
of us.
Rocket Man
spouts from the mouth of the President,
an Elton John fan, who wishes he could
pack his golf bag and leave DC
instead of enforcing a nuclear ban.
It’s lonely in the Oval Office. He misses
driving, chipping and putting so much
it sometimes hurts. He knows he’s not the man
he thinks he is. DC is not the kind of place
to raise a son named Barron.
All these policies he doesn’t understand.
It’s just his job seven days a week. Still,
he knows lyrics from famous songs he used to love,
bellows them in jest to connect to citizens
who just don’t understand.
And he thinks it’s gonna be
a long, long time until he’s playing
the back nine again. That North Korean
crisis – he has no clear, strategic plan
except to refer to that guy as Rocket Man.
Hospital
No paradise can be found
in the hospital, except pink
flowers in the patient’s room.
She stares out the window
searching for planets
she might one day inhabit
When the flowers shrivel
and fall from the blue vase.
Maureen Sherbondy’s books are After the Fairy Tale, Praying at Coffee Shops, The Slow Vanishing, Weary Blues, Scar Girl, The Year of Dead Fathers, and Eulogy for an Imperfect Man. Her work has appeared in Southeast Review, Calyx, Roanoke Review, and other journals. I live in Durham, NC.She received her MFA degree from Queens University of Charlotte. Maureen lives in Raleigh, NC with her three sons.