THE GOSSIP AND HER TIMID HUSBAND

by Suzan Abrams


She was a pugnacious sort, a lizard tongue
preying on overtime. She tasted betrayals
for trifles and gossip fed candy into her body
parts, her soul measured eternity all wrong.
Lungs raced on slippery grace, inhaling
the fumes of slander with clumsy distaste
and tunnelling down, a freezer
for a tummy that shunned its slimy defrost
to bottle up the heady juice of news.
And what with withered breasts for a
rocketed aerobic stretch, pendulums
that even professed circus swings
downside up and forgot their dignified ride
to the grave...

Or she may have resembled a cake, obese
for a sunken oven squeeze. But you, the
husband desiring the obtuse for a potent
perversion rested bravely, a carnation
cradled on a lapel, and plumped up by
rosettes, despondent in the gullied nest of
her feathery skin.

Why, the other day she served me tea.
Cherries from freckles and chocolate spat
from the bowels of a throat. And she wore
the fray from her commendable tray on a
smile that may have turned a wedding
hat into an elusive bat.

She kept her glee with the wee bit
of an Earl Grey Special if I wasn’t to mind...
she whispered its mud brew where she had
squatted with aerobic precision to kiss a frog.
As for the milk and sugar, ferried about like
wallet stowaways, watch her squeeze the
leather dry from dripping fat. More cream,
she’d ask except that a touch of acne pus
would do it nicely and one ought to utter
one’s thanks wisely.

But she was a pugnacious sort, licking your
days with gossip in her body parts and her
criminal toes a quarreling band of dwarves
to shovel up wrongdoings for a fee. Still,
the dutiful wife, she kettles your whims into
a nice hot broth as you wheedle your way
from a sting. And so her fingers scrub and
clean and sing.