I’m sorry I made out with your new girlfriend
at my birthday party – how she got invited
in the first place is a mystery. When I purchased
that enormous plastic handle of cheap vodka,
I did not anticipate that your new girlfriend
would swig directly from it, and then kiss me!
I was simply not prepared for your new girlfriend,
whose fluid, drunken logic was persuasive
enough so that we wound up in my bedroom.
It was strange, me making out with my replacement.
It felt at first like giving her a lesson,
teaching her, by touching, how I touched you:
I should have kicked her out, but for a second
it was like she and I were you and me again.
_
Ali Shapiro lives on a boat in Seattle, WA, where she freelances in various writing-related capacities. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Linebreak, and on anderbo.com, among others. She's won various prizes for her writing and other exploits, including a Bertlesmann World of Expression scholarship, a Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Recently, two poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at www.ali-shapiro.com.
at my birthday party – how she got invited
in the first place is a mystery. When I purchased
that enormous plastic handle of cheap vodka,
I did not anticipate that your new girlfriend
would swig directly from it, and then kiss me!
I was simply not prepared for your new girlfriend,
whose fluid, drunken logic was persuasive
enough so that we wound up in my bedroom.
It was strange, me making out with my replacement.
It felt at first like giving her a lesson,
teaching her, by touching, how I touched you:
I should have kicked her out, but for a second
it was like she and I were you and me again.
_
Ali Shapiro lives on a boat in Seattle, WA, where she freelances in various writing-related capacities. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Linebreak, and on anderbo.com, among others. She's won various prizes for her writing and other exploits, including a Bertlesmann World of Expression scholarship, a Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Recently, two poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at www.ali-shapiro.com.
