Sea Lettuce
       

How easily our loved ones
leave us, speeding into sunsets,

maiming us with absence.
Sailboats, pelicans—

beyond us they don't miss us.
Is sympathy a medicine?

In this green lobotomy,
Mrs. Lettuce, will you listen?

We can be each other's sister.
We can go down whole

into a vegetable utopia
where no amount of man is

who hasn't lost his skin
or children to the knife,

his character to butter—
a massaging, nodding franchise

of ears that take us in
and praise the way we suffer.

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Copyright © 2011 Larissa Szporluk All rights reserved
from Traffic with Macbeth
Tupelo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission