NEWLYWEDS
We leased it based on our impression
of the model—fully furnished, as if
page 37 of Pottery Barn’s fall catalogue—
He carried me over the threshold,
and together we surveyed our empty rooms,
beige and white walls—
Ran our fingers through the bedroom’s tan
Berber carpet—And laying naked, my head
on his chest, simultaneously noticed—
How the bedroom and closet doors opened—knob to ding knob—
collided into each other, so that neither
could fully open, unless the other was shut.
—from Rattle #62, Winter 2018
__________
Delphi Sky: “It all began with a prompt in Roger Rosenblatt’s master class at the Southampton Writers Conference—upon the auditorium doors closing, we set pen to paper for ten minutes. ‘Newlyweds’ came swiftly in a complete draft and was an act of serendipity … and my desire to surrender to wherever a poem may go. Like marriage, we enter poetry with expectations influenced by predesign and struggle to make it our own. Yet, unlike the solitary privacy of poetry, marriage is an intimate partnership of two autonomous individuals coming together in a predesigned socioeconomic environment.”
