New poems by April Salzano.

 

Sims 3: Ambitions

 

My ten-year-old son says to me:

I lost all my money somehow

either I paid my taxes or I lost my job

and you need money to eat

and have plumbing

so when your hunger gets really low -

there’s a bar and it goes down to show

how low it is -

you starve to death.

So I make funny ways to die,

knowing I am going to.

Ok, so before I die, I get in the shower

or I get in bed with my wife

or someone else’s wife, that’s even better.

Or I lie down with my daughter, or

someone else’s, or

wet myself and go to a friend’s

house and die in his bed

while he’s watching tv.

Or I go to work to die.

I am a teacher so that’s funny, dying

right in front of your students,

or in a random person’s shower.

Or while driving or having sex or fishing.

Just fall in the lake. You come back

to life, you just have nothing

when you do.

 

 

Yesterday’s Fiasco

gave me a hive the size

of a golf ball on my forehead so

I drew a face on it with eyeliner

and called it quits. I also

have heartburn and a lump

in my throat a Vicodin hangover

a rebound headache and more

regret than I thought I could contain.

I was recovering

from a crisis the day before

that made me run until

I was out of fluid

in my joints so I smoked one

which made me sleep

in I was late for work

before I remembered that I don’t

anymore. They fired my sorry ass

for being melodramatic on the job.

 

 

Love Affair

 

Last night my husband dreamed I broke

up with him for a poem. He said it wasn’t

the least bit funny. It was

realistic, line breaks

and stanzas scattered around

the house as evidence. Don’t think

it didn’t hurt because it did, you

wanting a poem more than me.

You stopped cooking dinner,

the house was a disaster.

All you cared about was this

poem. By this point he’s crying,

and I am still trying to get a visual

of a love affair with a poem.

How did we…?

My husband was dead

serious here. I tried to be

sympathetic, but the whole idea

was, well, poetic.

We’d have a couple haikus,

build a small press in the woods,

and live happily ever after, anthologized

on opposing pages.

 

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