Two Poems from Robert Wexelblatt

Photo Found in an Old Copy of Open Marriage

You can tell the wife’s anxious about her looks.
Her thickset hubby in jogging shorts and Lacoste shirt
squeezes off a grin like a potshot at his dead
dad (“You’ll come to nothing, Pissant,” he’d said).
Her taut smile’s dissatisfied; she’s looking to flirt.
He wields a fork: outdoors, it’s the man who cooks.

A forgotten snapshot in a misleading book:
fading pastels, foolish hair and ugly chairs,
a leafy suburb that was in its prime.
These puerile swingers are unaware that time 
presently will poison their spanking new affairs.
The Polaroid has that washed-out, 70’s look.



 Ma Lecteuse

Rolled tightly, the story’s eleven pages just
squeezed into the ex-Laphroaig bottle. I pounded the
cork with my palm then drove to the seashore.

I pressed twelve stamps to the corner then slipped my book
inside. No address. “My letter to the World,” I mocked,
shoving it down the throat of a flag-colored mailbox.

I’ll fold and crease the single sheet with
this poem on it; I’ll make a glider of it—
then the slow climb up the stairs to the roof.

 

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is a short novel, Losses.