Swimming again in gin, confidence
wafer-thin, when my wife says
I need a new blazer, one that makes me
not an asshole. Green, perhaps.

Abracadabra. Now I’m a seersucker man,
straight out of some southern situation
where I’m sweating and missing the spittoon.
Still, she says, we need to call a service person.

I study the way she skewers me,
an olive pierced in a martini.
Still, it’s better than tending a leap of leopards
or folding that tattered map she never uses.

I’m strained and strewn from that abandoned cartwheel,
my age and shabby habits reminding me that
this elaborate labyrinth of complicated gestures
requires maintenance. Futility like that

doesn’t just happen. Pain is a strict instructor
and thud is always one stair step away.
See, it was worth the fight, she says,
to end so early in the night.

…
Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. His work has been published in North of Oxford, Hole in the Head Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly and 2River View among others.