Bookcase
Dee Dee came by this morning
wanting to know how I
was coming along on her bookcase,
actually not caring, she said,
no hurry, just curious.
Have you ever heard of something
by someone? she asked. You
being a former English teacher
and all, I figured anybody
knew about it, you would.
I hadn’t heard of it she was
going to get it anyway,
a reference in there about
a town close to where she grew up
over how many years ago.
That sure was pretty wood that oak,
not like that old pine everybody
told her she could get at Wal-Mart
for half the price, not lasting near
as long, turning out real nice.
Don’t let her stop me, she’d be
going, just wanted to stop by
to see if I’d know anything
she ought to buy to put along
side that one we’d talked about,
by the way what was the name
of it again, she couldn’t
remember anything these days,
and be sure to inscribe it,
the back maybe, from you to me.
Viagra
You’d think God would let a man
rest and give a woman peace
after fifty years. Yet He’s come
along (you feminists tell me now
He could be a woman) and dropped
a formula in some young (of course)
scientist’s ear on how to raise
Mt. Richard from its limpid deep.
As if breakfast and underwear
and the weekly sweep were not enough,
now he’s come squeezing and poking
his attention into every nook
a kitchen holds private, making
weekdays and chores already bad
worse with innuendoes about
weekend time trials and pole position.
I don’t know what’s to be done now
except to wish (you see the embarrassment
of prayer) that Nature, a woman herself,
somehow corrects the enormous
mistake by restoring to all of us
some intellect: why, from patriarch’s
days it’s been nothing but good sense
to leave the genitals blacked out.
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Ed From The Garage Stops
By to Talk Philosophy
“The tool you order is
never the same in person:
take this wrench here, as
advertised on TV,
able to loosen the hind
quarter of a moose, a limp,
pussy-levered fidget
that couldn’t jack the nuts
off a sixty-seven Buick;
“just as the person you
get is never the same tool,
whoever he or she
happens to be—I name
no one in particular,
huddled up little round backs
with dip-snuff mouths in a bar, […]
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The Bun
There is no having fun
in this life,
tight spooled, pinned,
barretted,
moving with the strict nose
of the library countenanced.
If I work loose enough
at mid-morning
to summon the glance
of a stranger
I am tucked and powdered
as if I were a child.
And by afternoon, many times
poked with pencils,
harassed by glasses,
I am stayed tighter
than a girdle on someone’s
great-aunt Grundella.
Evenings out, it is
uptight all over again,
even if
the long-stemmed drinking
elicits only a shrug
for straying.
What joy is there spilled
alone on a chair?
I would talk to Cleopatra,
the blond on the corner.
Effete? No, a curl
in a world with no horrid.
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Trent Busch, a native of rural West Virginia, now lives in Georgia where he writes and makes furniture. His recent books of poetry, not one bit of this is your fault (2019), Plumb Level and Square (2020), West Virginians (2021), and Through the Cracks (2022) were published by cyberwit.net. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Chicago Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Kenyon Review, American Scholar, Shenandoah, Boston Review, and Hudson Review.
“Viagra” was originally published in So It Goes, The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. “Ed from the Garage Stops by to Talk Philosophy” was originally published in Santa Fe Literary Review. “Bookcase” was originally published in Boston Review and Poetry Daily. “The Bun” was originally published in Blue Unicorn.