Shopping Cart
    items

      December 16, 2015A Woman like That with Problems like ThoseLisa Glatt

      Last night on the beach I rattled around
      with a man I’d never see again.
      He was younger than me,
      sort of stupid, I think, though I was drunk
      and high and grieving
      so I can’t be sure of anything.
      We rattled around, like I said,
      in the sand, and it was hard to walk,
      and it was hard to see, and he was hard,
      my hand making its clumsy ride into his boxers,
      and he was saying something cliché
      about the moon, three stars, hoping that a woman
      like me, a woman drunk at 3 a.m. with a stranger
      on a beach, a woman whose ailing mother slept
      within earshot, a 30-year-old woman like that
      with problems like those, with so much obvious
      desire and sorrow, would respond to the moon,
      to those three stars, to him, to the bottle
      of brown booze he had snuggled
      in his backpack. After playing around,
      I stopped him—some might call it teasing,
      others insight, but it hit me like a diagnosis,
      what I was doing, where I had been,
      and I jumped from the sand, and left him there,
      with his Levis half on and half off, his confusion,
      maybe anger, left him with the moon,
      with only my body’s imprint in the sand,
      with his hard penis like a finger
      pointing at my back.

      from Issue #7 - Summer 1997