WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T WEAR GLOVES
Trimming oleander along the back fence
might be easier than a few too many pills.
They’d say he forgot to wear gloves. Whatever
happens after that is none of my business.
Let my new wife handle the details:
sparklers maybe. Taquitos fried just right.
Hire a juggler—the man from Venice Beach
with a hand hanging from his elbow.
Invite vatos in Eldorados selling pulque
liquor brewed in milk bottles. Thursday:
a classified ad for the antique shaving stand
I stored in the shed. She always liked the back
left leg, how it wobbled. And the lacquer finish
(not original). It’s worth two-fifty but she’ll
take seventy-five. That’s why I married her.
—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness
__________
Mark Lee Webb: “I have experienced mental illness from both sides of the window: as an intern in a state mental hospital while in college, and with my own personal bipolar episodes and depression as an adult. If nothing else, this gives me a lot of material for my poetry! When I am depressed nothing works; words lie flat on the page. When I’m on my bipolar ‘A’ game, my writing is fluid and in touch with the universe. Somewhere in the middle are my best poems.”
