her bidding. But there’s nothing to withhold now if he doesn’t want her. She tried to talk about it with Roger Junior, but he was lost trying to counsel his mother about her sex life. Penelope thinks about what she has gained and lost in this, the only marriage she’s ever had. She wonders if other marriages are different. She wonders if Willie touches Rosemary. She wonders if Roger will ever touch her again. She wonders how to shut her mind off. Being with someone who doesn’t acknowledge your existence is almost worse than being alone. In the darkness, she rises. She walks over and sits on the piano bench and starts playing Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll.” When she finishes, she looks up and sees Roger in the doorway, sipping his Manhattan and smiling.
My Heart-Shaped Bruise Poetry
Eve Dineva n/a
The fairy-blue smoke escapes the lips then curls around the slim, so - familiar fingers of your beautiful hands once wrapped around me, in methe scent to dance above us and dissolve in the stale air of the motel room in the corner of 45th and Elm. It’s the time I’m the happiest it’s when I’m the saddest as I stare at the clock numbers melting on the light of the dawn threatening to break in through the thick curtains. I’m a puddle of disjoined human parts, it’s limbs, it’s bones and their being fragile it’s you leaving and me lying here scattered shattered with my breaths dissipating it’s my proof this happened it’s my heart-shaped bruise no matter what’s to come.
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Avoid the Hedonic Treadmill, A Guide to What You Need: Poetry
Abbey Lynne Rays
Dublin, California USA
I Connection Find meaning in the mundane. Celebrate washed windows, good coffee, anything authentic to splinter loneliness and lay salve to dark days. II Generosity, the offering of more than prayers. Hands calloused on work for another, giving more than comfort allows. III Forgiveness, before the sour, before the apathy has bore down. While the sting still fresh, the edge still raw. Forgive. IV and gratitude, for what is, and what is not. For all these fractured things, imperfections of a life truly loved.
