“Elvis kissed me once,” she swears,
sitting in a neon dive
ordering her drinks in pairs.
Two stools down you nurse a beer,
sensing easy pickings here.
“Back in sixty-eight,” she sighs,
smoothing back her yellow hair.
Teared mascara smears her eyes.
Drawing near, you claim you’ve met,
offer her a cigarette.
“Call me cheap,” she sobs, “or bad,
say that decent men dismissed me,
say I’ve lost my looks, but add,
Elvis kissed me.”
– T.S. Kerrigan
Everyone who made love the night before
was walking around with flashing red lights
on top of their heads — a white-haired old gentleman,
a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman
who smiled at me from across the street
and gave a little secret shrug,
as if the flashing red light on her head
was a small price to pay for what she knew.
- Hugo Williams
Theirs is a trade for egomaniacs,
People whose parents did not love them well.
It’s done by wasps and women, Jews and Blacks,
In every isolation ward in Hell.
They spend their workadays imagining
What never happened and what never will
To people who are not and whose non-being
Always depends on the next syllable.
It’s strange, and little wonder it makes them so
Whose lives are spun out talking to themselves
In allegories of themselves that go
Down on the paper like dividing cells
That form in communes and make colonies
And do each other in by love and hate
And generally enact the ceremonies
Intended to harmonize freedom and fate
Among the creatures and in the writer’s soul.
The writer’s soul? It’s as if one abyss
Primps at the other’s mirror and the whole
Shebang hangs fire while the lovers kiss.
- Howard Nemerov
