October 2020
Sharon Waller Knutson
fitmama@hughes.net
Bio Note: A retired journalist, I live in a wildlife habitat in the Arizona desert where I write poetry, hike and photograph wildlife. I recently published in Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review and US Worksheets of which V-V poet Nancy Scott is managing editor. I have enjoyed corresponding with V-V poets, some of whom are my idols, and reading reviews. The support of the community inspired me to write more poems this month than I have in a year.

What the Psychic Doesn’t Tell You 

The Picasso-like painter
you meet on vacation
will not be picking you up
at the Mexico City airport
when you quit your job
to study fiction writing
and you will ride a bus
with squawking chickens
on hairpin curves for hours.
You will fall in love
with the mariachis and matadors,
the guard dog who sleeps
in your bed, and the novelist
with a wife and kids in Toronto,
who will break your heart.
The maid will cure your Hepatitis
by brewing broths of goats head,
chickens feet, onions and jalapenos, 
from her Medicine Man’s recipes.
Even if the psychic had, 
you would have gone anyway.

Taking the Doberman to the Vets in the Movie Director’s
Limousine in Mexico in the Seventies

I don’t tell him I played 
Blanche Dubois
in the method acting workshop
and bashed a beer bottle
over the bald head
of the Brando lookalike
and he ended up in the ER
with a concussion 
because I can tell he regrets
stopping on the cobbled
street where I wave my arms
and Sylvia howls and shows
him her sore paw 
and I assure him she
doesn’t have fleas
and isn’t contagious
because he is handing
me a paper towel and telling
me to wipe up the slobber
before it ruins his leather seats.
Good thing the worms
wait until we get to the vets
before they start crawling out
because I don’t tell him
about them either.
©2020 Sharon Waller Knutson
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