Today's poem is by Baron Wormser

Three-Years-out-of-College-Laundromat-Late-Sunday-Afternoon Blues
       

You should have dealt with the wine stain
Immediately but your life, as you told your mother
On the phone last night, has had too much
Immediacy—David leaving with a peremptory
"This is it," which was perfect, his using
An indefinite pronoun as a way of avoiding
Something resembling feeling, something like
Heartache, heart-rake, heart's collapsed
Three-layer cake—
                                and your cat having some
Possibly fatal liver malady, your cat, the one
True being in your starved environs—as you
Pull out a stack of quarters while wondering if
Your underwear has reached the embarrassing
Stage of decrepitude (as opposed to the bohemian
Or erotic stages) and thinking how David liked
You to wear underwear to bed so he could take them off
And ignite some fantasy that did launch
A humdinger boner but that now is an unfond memory,

Which you sense this laundromat will become
When you reach the far shore of adulthood
Where the underwear are intentionally functional
Amid two cars, your own washing machine,
A crying baby and a photo somewhere of a young
Woman wrestling with a tall pink plastic basket
And a second-person sense of life that replenished
Itself in the stacked and folded wealth of cleanliness.

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Copyright © 2024 Baron Wormser All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission