Ives Williams

It’s a New Week

My husband makes coffee and I read the paper in my robe, Sunday morningness parading throughout the centerfold

This scene, that second word, only possible within the past decade

And yet if you were to see us on cathode rays in Lucy’s black and white

Familiarity would shrug

Husband and wife? Two wives? Two gents? Who’s who- and from there, we get to “why?”

You get asked that a lot nowadays.

I sit and think perhaps we are

Too bright, too shiny, too new.

Is this what it means to blaze trail?

To have static to turn towards when you search

For the flicker of self in the narrator’s voice-

Write your own! They say. Nevermind if anyone will ever script it-

Who knows what technicolor has for us!

Trust the future,

Though the past holds only forgotten names and loves and lives

This time it will be different!

Said to tired voices and bodies

still burnished out

from tintypes to tabloids to text book

How thankless, for novelty to be so weary

But in the present scene, my husband has made fresh bread,

And it is still warm