What Rough Beast | Poem for September 22, 2019

Deborah Bacharach
The Polls Say We Drink Wine

America needs to buy a mop because the old one’s
covered with shit from last week when
the toilet overflowed because we chose
the soft two-ply paper in the back of the closet
left over from when we thought it was no big deal.

America had a delightful midlife crisis—motorboats,
dancing. We drank two wines: sweet and sweeter.
The bread had a crown of salt.
We always think we have more time.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Antigonish Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Cimarron Review, among other journals, and in the anthologies Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, and Carole Simmons Oles; and Sex and Single Girls: Women Write on Sexuality (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. She lives in Seattle where she a writing tutor. Online at DeborahBacharach.com.

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