By George Yatchisin
When a week into a daily month
of poems the inspiration cupboard
seems bare, consider the sofa
in the other room, the wired fireplace,
cheery, fake and smoke-free,
all the better in this ailing age when
one cough can send the mind
reeling. Sit there with the wife
you never could have imagined
and who is somehow yours, even if
that’s too possessive for what
you’ve managed to build between.
Screw words, so many mean
different things, the synonyms
and antonyms piling up like logs
you can’t burn in the electric fire.
There’s nothing but to hold, hold on.
George Yatchisin is the author of Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). He is co-editor of Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and his poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library 2019). Also by this poet: "Micheltorena and San Andres" and "Even on a Marine Layer Day"