Three Wonderful Poems by Alec Solomita

 

Lie Back in My Arms

 

Lie back in my arms.

Let your wasted bones

melt into me like butter

into batter,

batter the color

of the crusty corners

of your always-open

mouth.

Let me relish

your stale muddy

breath as your

cabled limbs sink

into my flesh

until I’ve absorbed

you completely.

Long ago, my dear,

you’d sit above me

holding yourself up

with young muscles,

shifting forward and back,

your breasts breaking

like easy waves

under an early sky.

 

 

Husbands

 

The trouble with husbands

is they’re always there.

You chat with a woman at a party

and who pops up but this square

 

dressed in a blond goatee and Sox cap.

“I’m Jimmy!” he insists, shooting his hand at me.

And you don’t doubt that for a sec:

Jimmy he is and Jimmy he’ll always be.

 

You have a quiet cup with an old dear

and her cell phone rings four times in half

an hour. “He’s a little wary,” she says,

“I should put it on vibrate,” she adds with a laugh,

 

“There’d be some percentage in that, at least.”

With age, my fabulous stable, my fleet fillies,

are all tethered to some devoted good person

and I’m left trotting on my own flat feet.

 

O, for the days when husbands were boyfriends!

Before they were grooms, they’d do the grooming,

and I was the midnight rider! Ha! Now it’s a struggle

to steal a kiss from the old mares, a bleak thing

 

that. A meeting of licked lips, a tip of tongue,

the rumour of a breast against my chest.

Not really worth the effort or the money,

in some dark bar, paying more and more for less and less.

 

 

Cathexis

 

Garnet was my mother’s birthstone

It’s in the semi-precious category,

not as hard, not as bright as a ruby.

Not as precious but just as fine –

a supple red blush.

 

She wore a largish one in a smallish brooch.

It was rectangular and clawed into place

by the insect legs of some metal –

semi-precious perhaps, but perhaps not,

perhaps gold, a noble metal that endures.

 

She only wore the brooch when she went out.

I observed her toilette with pious intensity:

two swipes of deep red lipstick on her lower lip

then pressing both lips together with a casual élan.

 

She’d peer in her compact mirror

then clap it shut, releasing ecstatic puffs of powder,

before holding the compact up to my face

saying, “See the monkey!”

 

I laughed but was always a little surprised

that I didn’t see her face in the glass but her

pale, shy child shadow.

Alec Solomita is a writer and artist working in the Boston (USA) area. His fiction has appeared in the Southwest Review, The Mississippi Review, Southword Journal, and Peacock, among other publications. He was shortlisted by the Bridport Prize and Southword Journal. His poetry has appeared in Poetica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Litbreak, Driftwood Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Galway Review, The Lake, and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His photographs and drawings can be found in Convivium, Fatal Flaw, Young Ravens Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, and other publications. He took the cover photo and designed the cover of his poetry chapbook, “Do Not Forsake Me,” which was published in 2017. His full-length poetry book “Hard To Be a Hero,” will be coming out in spring of next year.