by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

 
“My flight into Sacramento is on time”
is the only line I can salvage
from his output, chronicling
the not yet auspicious date
he was certain would be celebrated
as a national holiday or better yet,
some holy esoteric occasion. Like Leopold
Bloom’s walk or the death of a particular
addict, the one who collected
miniatures as payment for voting
in a plebiscite that would prove worthless.
We thought these were the traditions
Of where we wed, cognac no one drank
and roses at graveside housed at a medical
school, a kind of ideological pairing if you
care to consider it, like we did. He wrote
to the local alternative weekly asking
about another frozen moment: the bulge
in the pants, and made a rough joke
about how the teen-age bride succumbed,
like he was doing to me or Eisenhower
supposedly did to the public, but that
still didn’t make him famous. He tried
counting syllables, points on the edge
of sentences, as if they were square
angles of brick that must be checked
for soundness every so often, lest
the entire structure enacts an avalanche
much like the marriage we had made
out of rags and stolen narratives.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length poetry collections, the most recent being My Aunt’s Abortion (BlazeVOX [books] 2023). More work is forthcoming in Evening Street Review, The Healing Muse, and the American Journal of Nursing. She also is the author of four chapbooks; two novels; and a memoir, and she reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK literary magazine.