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January-February 2010

Three Poems by Verne Good

Verne Good

Vitreous Something

One green eye
followed my footsteps
thru the parking lot.

I caught it in
a rusted hand,
surprised by my blinking palm.

plucked it dryly,
placed it in the ashtray
so I wouldn’t squish it on
the steering wheel.

It blinked disapproval
at the music squirping
from the speakers

“You’re pretty,
for an eyeball,”
I said, sliding the ashtray shut,
“but it’s my damned
car.”

I’d like to tell you
that I drove it home,
opened some wine,
sliced some brie and
some pear,

discussed mutual affections
for Schwitters, Acker, and Grieg;

debated art and its role
in modern life;

I’d like to tell you
that, in spite of
all scientific and biological
limitations, we managed
to experience explosive
sexual congress,

and that,
yes,
we are expecting
offspring any day now.

I’d like to tell you
that my life’s purpose
was found inside
one little green
eyeball.

Truth is, though
I forgot about it.
It shrivelled and dried out
in my car’s ashtray.

I only saw it again
a year later,
looking for spare toll nickels.
It looked like a
cross between a jalapeno pepper
and those weird styrofoamy
shrimp chips you get
from Thai restaurants.

A simple fragile night,
blown
blinking ever into dust.

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Donation

Alone. Broke
in a damp room.
Spiders encroach on
niceties of
visitor cats.

Rationing out salt
and frozen foods
per days left in this
pretty, quiet town

The stew you gave me
ziplocked and labelled
“lamb stew, May 08”

I heated it up in a saucepan
and added salt.

Thank you
for thinking of me.

Verne Good lives in Toronto, where she writes poetry, and does sound and light design for theatre. Her poems have appeared in Rampike and Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems.

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