by Diane Klammer
You asked me when I knew
Oh, but we marched all day getting beach in our hair
Complaining about our bosses about our bed
The patchwork your mother made is falling apart
The patchwork is falling apart or something and
I ordered two Cokes and some meat between stale
Bread and we both dropped them
Smeared mustard on our
shirts and I was nothing
until you wiped the mustard
into my favorite pants
but there can’t be nothing
wrong with this one
Can’t be nothing that don’t work in this one
It’s about love dedicated to the inner thigh of things
So I says nothing and the waves are hurricanes
Like car radios misting against rocks
There was a great sea monster that day
Shaped like a tugboat you said but I said
Sea monster – the one that eats fisherman –
The one that eats lobster is me and the one that eats
Sushi is us but the one that eats fisherman is shaped like
Tugboat heading to where we can see the world turn.
Christopher Barry lives in New Hampshire where he is a high school English teacher. His poetry has appeared in multiple journals and magazines including Discretionary Love, Jarfly, Scavengers, Feral, and Sport Literate. Follow him on Instagram @mrbarrywrites.
Diane Klammer is a disabled writer, singer-songwriter, retired therapist, and biology teacher. Her work has appeared in the United States and Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, and Australia. She has appeared in Lummox, Avocet, Open Earth Eco Poems, Rattle, Spaces, and elsewhere, forthcoming in Syncopation Review and Missing Slate Review. She strives to write from a place of humor and compassion and is grateful for diverse voices of poetry in books music and film.