January 2024
Irving Feldman
flefty@gmail.com
Bio Note: Born and raised in Coney Island, I'm a Coney Island patriot. And squash racquets fanatic. My headstone is to read, "One More Game?" Recent books include: Collected Poems 1954-2004 Schocken Books 2004, and Usable Truths: Aphorisms & Observations, Waywiser Press 2019. My readings of some of my poems can be found HERE.

Bad Brunch
What got them started hardly mattered, did it? Enough it was Sunday, endless, awful Sunday. Or maybe it was that porky, dorky friend of hers she hadn't seen in years and barely recognized, photographed looking just too hopefully happy among the weekend's supplement of brides. And how long from now would be among the mothers? (Unawares, her teeth began to interrogate a ridge of skin inside her lower lip: So, what have I got? And is it what I want?) That gown might be set off by legible ruffs of printer's ink offset from the facing page, that gaze be disconcertingly bespectacled (did the bridesmaids tackily do glasses, too?), that thumbnail bio better padded than the dress —and yet she felt that by some magician's trick she'd been flung, had caught, here in her breakfast nook that pudgy fist's brash bouquet of nettles, felt so complexly wronged, so obscurely punished that she could soothe one sting only with another, and only then if she kept completely still. He should have known that, irksomely did not —rustling paper, clearing his throat, breathing loud. Botched, embittered, ruined, hideous, lost, the perfect day she ludicrously had planned, had permitted herself to savor in advance! Imagine, terrorized by brides and babies! Everything undefined—she hated that, while he seemed actually to prefer it this way, deferring, shilly-shallying, noncommittal. But she knew it in her bones: absence of structure, chaos, is sign and origin of corruption. She looked at him sprawl snug in his self-complacence, letting things slide thoughtlessly, but then, perhaps, such his opportunism, deliberately. She startled herself by asking, Is he corrupt? And if he is, mustn't I be tainted, too? After all, Bluebeard's wife also had to be at least a little aqua around the gills. No, shallow people were wicked in a way —simply didn't know the effects of what they did, or whom they did it to. Did he know her? And could she any longer say she knew herself? Something here had gone badly, badly wrong. That moustache was one fine line she should not have crossed. Alarms sent his alpha waves scrambling. His adrenaline got right up on its toes. Backpedal? Plunge ahead? Take off? Lie low? "Oh god, what is it now?" he almost blurted. Her mood had caught him smack in full revery. Ball scores stopped their calibration of glory. He was too distracted to consider duly the profound mystery embodied in stats. Angels with shining tape measures in their beaks, who hover over home runs, had all been blown away. The crossword lay a shambles of cross words. Not the Sunday for which he'd penciled in SEX —horizontal, vertical, before lunch, after. One more chance for fun-before-death gone down in smoke! The whites of his eyes came fluttering up from the fat, white trash of the Sunday paper. He must have felt something of what she was feeling, because he smiled so reassuringly it was reassuring almost, and might have been but for that eager—beseeching—grin it ended in, his coy mummery of "I'm just a simple guy." Apologize and not put it in words? How could he! —as if she weren't worth the cost and effort to exhale a few intelligent sounds. He underestimated her, she knew that --and she'd prove it to him if it was the last thing she ever did! Little man, she thought, you won't, although you try to, undercut till the end of time my every effort to take you seriously.
©2024 Irving Feldman
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