Poem Courtesy of Debra Marquart:

Back when we were still together, it seemed

my ex-boyfriend could never lose anything. 

Car keys, dollar bills, everything that fell from

his charmed pockets floated back.  Lucky us. 

Check books dropped in grocery store parking lots

delivered to our front door by Good Samaritans

before the ice cream melted.  Perhaps this is why

he treated me with such benign neglect, forgetting

how the slippery dime of me could work through

the stitches of silk pockets. Once, at the therapist’s

he handed the Kleenex box to me with this look

on his face, like poor you, like I was some catastrophe

under glass.  Oh, poor us.  It reminded me of a cartoon

I’d seen in the paper of two men in a sinking canoe. 

The guy in the front end is submerged, taking in water,

already drowning.  The guy in the back of the canoe

is tipped high and dry.  In the caption, he’s thinking,

Boy, am I glad I wasn’t on that end of the boat.

© Debra Marquart