Into the House of Love
The landlady informs me she owes me hundreds of dollars.
Apparently, I’ve been overpaying her for months.
What she doesn’t know is I’m building a house for her as a present.
Inside the house, there will be a colorful tomb.
I will push her in this colorful tomb.
She doesn’t know it yet. I have so many tricks up my sleeve.
It’s because I’m passive aggressive. It’s because I’m mean and violent.
Have you built a house with a colorful tomb at its center yet?
The sea has a center. And everyone loves the sea
because the sea loves no one. She pulls in everything: the nursery
the moon, the glass of milk the moonlight
shines through on the kitchen counter.
If I had to compare the sea to something
I’d compare her to the sea.
—
This selection comes from Sandra Simonds’ book The Sonnets, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here!
Sandra Simonds is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008) and Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2014, the American Poetry Review, Fence, Poetry, and other journals.
Margaret Bashaar’s poetry has been previously collected into two chapbooks, Letters from Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel (Blood Pudding Press) and Barefoot and Listening (Tilt Press), as well as in many literary journals and anthologies including Rhino, Caketrain, New South, Copper Nickel, and Time You Let Me In. She lives in Pittsburgh where she edits the chapbook press Hyacinth Girl Press and is a staff writer for Luna Luna Magazine. Her debut collection, Stationed at the Gateway, will be published by Sundress in 2015.
