Monday Night Poetry Club

This one belongs to a great lady. I may have embarrassed myself horribly when I took her back to her hotel last week (I really ought to invest in a belt for these falling-down pants, and I really ought to stop giving gushing reviews of famous writers’ work while we’re skidding down from pothole to pothole in the rain), but that in of itself doesn’t make a difference to me.

Possessions

I sent you a list of what I wanted, and you boxed it up carelessly, as though for the backs
of strangers, or for the fire, the way you might

have handled a dead woman’s possessions—when you could no longer bear to touch
them, the clothes still fragrant, worn, still that reminiscent

of the body. Or perhaps your lover packed the many boxes herself, released from secret
into fury, that sick of the scent of me

in the bed, that wary of her face caught in my mirror—something I said I didn’t want,
where I would not see myself again.

– Claudia Emerson