Today's poem is by Andrea Hollander

What I Learned About Betrayal from a Woman on a Plane
       

They decided finally not to speak
of it, the one blemish in their marriage.
It happened

before the permanence
was set, before the children grew
complicated, before the quench

of loving one another became all
each of them wanted from this life.
Years later the bite

of not knowing (and not wanting
to know) still pierces the doer
as much as the one to whom it was done:

the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing,
the lack of touching, the undoing
undone.

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Copyright © 2023 Andrea Hollander All rights reserved
from And Now, Nowhere But Here
Terrapin Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission