Cad
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Cad
Whatever it was I’d done (or hadn’t)Almost a quarter-century ago,Her rage erupted when we met by chanceIn the coffee shop, each spilled invectiveRaw in a room calm with Norah Jones’ croon.
The uneasy baristas kept busyWhile I scanned the sea of gaping laptops,Its swift surge of hoisted heads, wonderingIf her loathing had boiled up only whenShe turned from dropping the crimped straw wrapper
Into the hole brimming with paper cupsTo face the man with whom she’d spent one night(Or less than one night) while her children sleptAnd her ex Ikea’d his guy condoIn sleek, taupe, post-adulterous closure.
We’d been tending each other’s loneliness,However that evening had ended, butHer snarled word was so 18th centuryAnd ludicrous even as she lobbed itThat laughter broke her vindictive fever,
And we sipped our grande mocha frappésAmong the awake and amused voyeursWaiting to see if what had (or had not)Taken place in the past might swirl aroundTo clasp us in prophetic happenstance. [End Page 257]
MICHAEL WATERS’s books include Celestial Joyride (2016), Gospel Night (2011), Darling Vulgarity (2006—finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001—finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize) from BOA Editions. He has co-edited Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Recipient of fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Foundation and NJ State Council on the Arts, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation.
