… / the work
now is to obey
the written rules
and vows to
preserve the
sleeping
arrangements,
rooms &
furnitures whose
books are yours
& mine
handed-down
glasswares
/ Today you said
everything is fine
was fine on our car ride to
the grocery but fine
is like cardboard
/ and then you said:
“it was rough for me, a rough beginning for me
I was not settled” that “we took you a while.”
what is rough? what does while mean? each word
in the mouth is dry like flour,
belies that soft h is never soft
in those words no matter the matter
/ I have thought
about while &
rough many times
and i couldn’t
put anything on
it but my sense
that we are
wrong is settled
and so time for
smoothing
out.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 3.
Dameion Wagner lives and works in Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Gordian Review, As It Ought To Be Magazine, and in Tilde: A Literary Journal (among a few others). His reviews appear in Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, with new reviews forthcoming in The Adroit Journal and 4squarereview. He won Miami University’s 2017 Jordan-Goodman Poetry Prize and is a 2018 recipient of the Academy of American Poets University Prize.
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