I’m trying to be a choice wife

My fidelity obscured by a poem gagging on the hayfull

panting on forced sophistication

A poem poemifying a woman and her persuasions until

it’s absolutely ergo, egret

O hum, O sunk, O hasn’t this heckled before?

My ankles stretch in a boneyard where

two skeletons are familiar in that famished way

Only a man’s chest never sheen is worthy of such errors

All fumble and March

All mind over grind

Maybe matted hair

I would not know

Began with the throat

Fell in love with a quotation I could not pronounce

He poemified a passage hoping I’d see myself

but the details were wanton, too pristine . . . no prissy

when reality was all flannel in flesh flambé

— a choice wife screaming “banshee!”

Yes, that’s shameful

All this pretendography is driving me home

where I try to be a choice wife

Complications come from poemification

Suspected he was a vegetarian

with no middle name and no true age

Think he owes me an explanation

Think he owes me a sympathy letter

I think he should serve me tacos and offer

a tulip as sauvignon

His poems only poemified my thighs and didn’t

mention I was trying to be a choice wife

while fists floundered, tongues clamped

There was a poetry reading held in a boneyard that

onlookers mistook for peep show

It should have been obvious

The aggrieved circled, fingered

my thoughtful frocks of fraught

for I was truly the choice wife