Two Erics? How did that happen? Is it a coincidence or kismet? Let’ give ’em both a read before we decide. Here’s our first, Eric Forsbergh.
The Love Poetry of Eric Forsbergh
My Lucky Jacket
My lucky jacket drapes me pleasingly:
a cross between the wings of victory
and an asbestos fire suit.
A cloth talisman,
it buffs my confidence
to polished brass.
After all, I wore it
during our initial kiss.
It’s my fabric shield
the eyes of trolls roll off.
On my motorcycle, in the rain,
I swear this jacket wards me
from a lightning strike.
You’re my loving skeptic.
You claim it’s not a coffin or a cure.
You claim what counts
will rise within my skin.
My lucky jacket? Some days
it’s like a rescue blanket made of foil:
shiny and appealing,
looking larger than it is,
but insubstantial, and
less than lucky after all.
**
Gaunt, but Fresh in Love
Divorce triggers deprivation
you explained.
Food’s available. Just not for me.
And twenty-five was more
than you could spare.
In your walk, you’d lost
the confidence of dance.
I arrived by accidental glance.
You’d even fallen sick,
you in that blue kerchief,
hair hanging limp. I looked past
shadows pooling in your cheeks,
your temple bones laid almost bare.
But hope’s a gill net.
It gathers tides of yearnings
schooling through unreal light
below the surface.
I applied oils and honey
to the marks he left on you:
the broadside volley of a turned back,
each pinch-and-twist fiction
on your lack of wit,
his burlap comments
abrading your satin
into sexlessness.
By summer’s end I washed your hair
as often as you wished.
And then you fed us both.
**
You’ve Got to Pick Your Bear
I’ve only dated you a month.
And this is our first hike.
On a water break,
lowering your canteen,
you level your eyes at me.
Are you ready to bring
your best timber
to this relationship?
Then you add, as an aside,
And where we’re going, you’ll learn
you’ve got to pick your bear.
The secluded campground
spreads in front of us,
its scenic sweep,
its back braced in hickories
while a nearby river garbles
deep among the ferns.
Then, nearly missed,
a fist or two of bear scat.
Well, fall is rutting season.
And spring means
mamas with cubs.
But this is summer I reply.
Exactly. Juveniles on their own,
easily intimidated.
So strip with me.
Let’s hit that river.
**
Love, with her Telltale Laughter
… while Love with her telltale laughter sped to Cyprus
where her grove and scented altar stand.
Book 8, The Odyssey of Homer
After such a dalliance,
a caprice of her design,
how she effects her escape
I still can’t understand. In a trice,
while still embedded in my eye, she’s off.
Her laughter, born of sea foam,
dances with her earrings,
trills across her lyre on a lost afternoon,
and weaves in the motion
of mating birds in flight,
To Cyprus did the blind
and bearded poet sing?
Even on this island’s rocky scarp,
with its men in hides of goats and swine,
my only Aphrodite casts her plea on me.
She built her grove and scented altar
next to a bedroom lamp
hung with a blue silk scarf,
tinting her grotto
like an underwater world
into which I wish to drown
before I learn to breathe again.
**
After a Summer Hike
On his way home
Napoleon wrote
to Josephine,
Don’t bathe.
Lifting the hair
off the back of your neck,
I want to taste the salt
from your evaporated sweat.
**
A Meditation on My Wife, with Edith Piaf
As she sews,
the sounds of Edith Piaf
spill small white feathers
out the summer windowsills.
They filter through the garden shade
where I am troweling in
transplants from the woods.
I cannot see her,
smell her, hear her.
Enough that music brushes
past her as it flows.
What rivets my attention?
Occasionally she poses
as the other woman
in that unctuous dress
and low-slung voice:
accessories she stole
from someone
I never sought.
**
Summer Sunday Volleyball
From the far side of the net,
I watch you leap
to tap the ball.
I observe an athlete,
her tee-shirt
riding up at every jump,
and I see the perfect navel
glance out momentarily,
the small mouth
of a cowrie shell set vertically.
How appealing, this attraction
centered in the muscles of the belly,
the ones you’ve worked so taut and tan.
Two springs ago, you invited me
to drink from this narrow slipper
so your fever could recede.
Tuesday, you tell me you are pregnant.
Complicit as I am,
I’ll learn to love by twice
the lace-like patterns
on your abdomen.
I should have known,
of all the money, love, and time
we’ll offer up,
you’d launch your body first
into the sacrifice.
**
Now That She Resembles James Dean
Do you notice anything?
Her comment, laid down like a mark.
Often I’m the one caught
napping in a class.
Except today.
She came home with his haircut,
not the soft shoulder flow
we found agreeable before.
Suddenly, it’s swept-back sides,
almost a crest on top. Not even
a tight bounce as she walks.
Did I forget some part of her?
Should I not assume an always tender look?
This hair could stare down the police.
Always, I confirm her
choice of cut and clothes
with brief and apt remarks.
But appreciation as an art
delves into noticing detail,
those layers built, those subtleties of taste.
Like the utmost care in sewing a designer piece.
Which is why she didn’t get it styled for me.
**
Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has published in The Fictional Cafe, JAMA, The Journal of Neurology, Artemis, Ponder Review, The Cafe Review and multiple other venues. He has twice won the Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and has been Pushcart nominated. A retired health care worker, he participated in two medical mission trips to Guatemala, and one to Appalachia. During COVID’s peak, he was a volunteer vaccinator for the Loudoun County Public Health Department. After earning a Master’s certificate in social justice at a seminary in his region, he is now undergoing training to teach poetry in prisons. He is a Vietnam veteran.
Introducing Susan Simonds, who is making her first – but hopefully not her last – appearance at The Fictional Cafe. She has entitled these works, “What I’ve Been ‘Working On.'”
What I’ve Been Working On
I’ve found that if you lay a body down
and keep still long enough
the pain [mostly] goes away
even the calves that ache
from the steep ups and downs
of the Harlem hills
even the middle vertebrae in your back
compressed from hours impressed in chairs
But the body recovers
as it lays still
it lies still
and tells you that pain is nothing
more than vibrations
and the weight of you on the earth
[and think of all the earth already has to bear]At least your pain is small, precise
you can locate it
you can put a pillow between sore thighs
to lift pressure, place it elsewhere
[because you already knowyou can get screwed over
even with your knees closed]
It doesn’t have to be like this
and yet here you are
still
wishing for the pain to sink
into the mattress
praying that your dreams are more
than just your imagination
but another world you can slip into
when you need to be less alone
but also only with your mind
Do not give in to movement yet
enjoy the calm
this is what they mean
when they say [enlightenment]
the act of not moving
of lightening yourself through pure focus
and when you are there
try not to be alarmed
it can feel like falling
but the beginning is always a wobbly child
soon you will twirl
leaving musical footprints in the wake
of your sound waves
Don’t say I didn’t warn you:
you can return to a faster pace
but your heart will ask to go back
it will not understand
why anything else matters
anymore
**
lexington ave
This is not real
life is not fantasy
don’t fall
the landslide
will kill your keep
I am a street below you
could you even find me
if not for lexington ave
63rd st
There is no condition
to my heart
or did you know that going in
I would accept you
regardless of your
unapproved carry
on my wayward love
do not worry
we are all here for you
as open as a sore
needing your wound
**
Tight
like the rubber
of my mind
expand to the left
right away from the diagram
its venn my vexing
you are
my hex
I should need
me down
down
don’t let me
down
**
For Giveness
If I could make magic
it would be in the shape
of forgiveness
First, I would forgive
my voice its tremble
every time I tried to say ‘no’
built a wall of tissue paper
only to have it beaten down
by your ‘yes yes yes’
Next, I would forgive
my eyes their salt
my throat its constrictions
all those quick-quick breaths
all the queasy sickness
all the times I feared the outside
when my mind was my sole enemy
Finally, I would forgive
you
and you, and you
for words hit hard like bruises
for sleepless sleepless
so tired
of crying
unheard
all night
And in the end I would
[hopefully] findunder the shell
[cracked] openinside
all that I am
for forgiveness gave me
my life
[back]**
Susan Simonds is a graduate of Adelphi University’s MFA program. Her poetry has been published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Blue Ridge Literary Prose, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and Three Line Poetry. She has taught English and creative writing and volunteered as a mentor with the NYC nonprofit, Girls Write Now. She is currently working as a learning center office manager and resides in Nashville.
Eric and Eric, c’mon in, have a cuppa creativity while meeting each other here at The Fictional Cafe. Up next: Eric D. Goodman.
Knights that Pass in the Ship
Two knights in shining armor
join together at a round table
centering of the ship’s dining hall.
One sits with his back to the window,
facing the door, watching.
His years as a royal guard informed him
that one should always watch for
a dark knight approaching.
The other sits with his back to the door,
preferring the view of the riverside beyond,
knowing that most who approach from behind
do so with good intentions.
Of course, those who watch for danger
have the advantage if it hits;
those who live with their breast plate off,
heart exposed,
may one day be injured.
So be it.
The knights part as friends,
each understanding new perspectives,
each clinging to old convictions.
**
Newsworthy
The death toll: staggering.
Wildfires in the west, hurricanes in the east.
The cowardly acts of the terrorists—
civil unrest breaking out in the sandy,
faraway republic bursting with
old Soviet warheads.
Headlines astounded
television viewers and social
media scrollers alike.
One person abducted on the same day
that last week’s innocent was found
mutilated in a ditch.
The fatal electrical fire at the puppy mill
outdone only by
the deadly gas leak at the orphanage.
All devastating news for an atypical news day,
taking eyeballs momentarily off presidential gaffes
and political posturing.
Lost in all this devastating news:
my first book’s publication day.
**
Buried Reason
As I walk through the graveyard,
see the rolling farmland on hills beyond,
I think of the native Americans
Who planted dead fish with their corn kernel
to fertilize and nurture,
to create life out of death,
and I see that the burying of the dead,
of those we love, did not begin
as a ritual of respect
or a suffocation of spreadable disease,
but as a story
intended to convince people who may not understand
why they really need to bury their dead
and to get them to fertilize the earth.
**
Systolic
Good job, but
when blood pressure moved
from borderline high
to healthy medium,
during a two-week staycation,
systolic dropping a full 20 points,
when a return to work
became a return to hypertension,
when unacknowledged stress
chipped away at health,
a realization:
good job, but
even better:
rationalizing what is not true.
**
Backyard Weeds
Watching the documentary
about the life of plants,
observing how root systems
map out the most efficient paths
to water and nutrients in the same way
that our civilization maps
a public transit system—
the visual image of the roots appearing
identical to a large city’s subway map—
it occurred to me that we,
despite our pretention
that humankind is superior
to every other life form—
animal and plant alike—
are really no more consequential
than the weeds
in our backyard.
**
Eric D. Goodman lives and writes in Maryland. He’s the author of Wrecks and Ruins (Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press, 2022) The Color of Jadeite (Apprentice House, 2020), Setting the Family Free (Apprentice House, 2019), Womb: a novel in utero (Merge Publishing, 2017) Tracks: A Novel in Stories (Atticus Books, 2011), and Flightless Goose, (Writers Lair Books, 2008). His short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in many periodicals, as well as several works on The Fictional Cafe. His recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Loch Raven Review, North of Oxford, and Bourgeon.
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