MATT GALLETTA
GO EZ-PASS!
Camping gear packed in the back seat
and cars packed on the highway,
she said,
“It seems like to get away from it all
you have to drive through it all.”
Then one bridge,
one tunnel,
one sign reading “Go EZ-Pass!”
and four hours later,
we were where we were.
Later, we got drunk
and passed out in the car,
having given up on
a tent that wouldn’t unfold and
firewood
so wet
it didn’t burn
it boiled.
In the morning we reversed the directions and got back in record time.
INSIDE
Your heart is
a Winnebago,
barreling down
a dead highway,
getting poor gas mileage
and turning rabbits
into
roadkill.
AN HONEST MAN
He reads poems to us
from his book,
his Recently Published book,
which is
(by the way)
on sale at the back of the room
for twelve dollars.
He stands in front of us
and reads,
one hand holding the book open.
The other hand rests on the podium
and occasionally pours a
glass of wine from the
jug on the table next to him.
Sometimes he gazes upward,
as if reading the poems
off the ceiling tiles.
The poems are all about
women he wants to sleep with:
his college students,
the supermarket cashier,
his dental hygienist.
He’s entertaining, and
the poems aren’t bad
though, really, they don’t say much.
His young wife is
in the audience
smiling at him,
smiling through the poems
about him fucking other women,
about him thinking about
fucking other women.
She seems cool with it,
like she understands that
these are just honest poems
read by an honest man,
like she knows that
this is just how men are,
this is what
all men think about.
He stops reading
for a moment to
pour himself another
glass of wine
and she keeps smiling,
but she’s sitting too still,
her smile is
too careful,
and he has not read
a single poem
about her.