July 2019
Note: Here is a poem culled from early married life. I too am a landlady now, though ill-suited for that as I am with most practical endeavors. Alas, it pays my bills while poetry and family make my life. www.donnahilbert.com
Mrs. Pulver, Landlady
Let your knees be neighbors.
Mrs. Pulver’s mother never
taught her that, so, when she came
to get the rent, I couldn’t help
but see her panties
and the tops of her pull-up hose.
She liked to have a cup of tea
and tell me what I’d need
to know, now that I was grown,
about to have a baby of my own.
She’d repeat the story
of her terrible wreck,
gas-pedal stuck,
the zoom down the hill,
legs broken, pelvis crushed.
“If it happens to you, girl,
what will you do?”
Mrs. Pulver, whose pelvis
is pulverized
became a song in my brain:
duck and cover
kill the engine
don’t lose the baby
down the drain.
from Gravity: New & Selected Poems
© 2019 Donna Hilbert
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