Stone Soup Croutons, 10-18-23: Date Night After the 2004 Election

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions selected from Stone Soup Poetry's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here.

 

I also have a book collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Lo Galluccio gave an excellent reading this week at Stone Soup. She read from Not for Amnesia, a book of poems written nearly decades earlier, mainly focusing around surviving in New York and an ex. The reading and my quick talk with her at the end--where I confused Diane Seuss with Diane Wakoski(what?!?)--got me to thinking what my life was like nearly twenty years ago.  

That's what this poem touches on. My first poem (loosely) about a certain ex in years. And it's because of Lo and the synergy of an open mic that somehow brings a theme or idea together every week.

 

Thanks to them. Thanks for reading.

Date Night After the 2004 Election

Smell of newly printed menus

keeps vision of new manuscripts

away from fire of latest war.

Country votes unanimously 

to adopt world of The Onion

herald a new dumb century.

Gifts to your lover don't match

first outfit from her mother.

Lover knows they never will.

For now, you've each other,

Parents wished the kids luck

from in their bubble bunkers.

You two screw anyway, 

bang all against the walls,

drown out goosestomps.

Both of you ready now

to compromise you futures,

but not with each other. 

Already mapped new paths,

down to pacing doctors visits,

planning how you will die.

Next day peaceful for one

of  you. You'll love again, 

but not like this. Not like this.

 

Special thanks to Jan Rowe, Bil Lewis, Nancy Dodson, Jon Wesick, Robert Fleming, Carol Weston, Jackie Chou, Bryan Franco, Ethan Mackler, James Van Looy and feature Lo Galluccio.