London Night
Sometime during our dinner of steaks and scallops and pasta with shaved truffles, and during our conversation,
which I can’t remember except her words about feeling alone when she wakes up by herself, an ass named Butt
behind the wheel of a white Renault van bulldozed people on London Bridge before he and his two accomplices,
brotherhooded by some wacky worship of Allah, jumped out and stabbed people in a psychotic frenzy around the bars
of the Borough Market, killing eight and injuring 48, before being shredded by police gunfire. Outside our restaurant,
under a June sky just wired for summer, we smoked cigarettes and read this news on our phones in Marylebone.
Gamy
As I look at a tall blonde, who’s popped out of a stone house, look at me, I forget my aches under the large oak trees garnishing the rich roosts
nestled away from the chaos of cars limping out of D.C. at dusk. My Impala is covered in salt. The streets are covered in salt. It’s freezing and in black spandex,
showing off her comely ass, she’s hoofing it like a jittery deer to grab something from her Cayenne or to drive to Balducci’s for ice cream since it’s Friday,
and she went to work and felt bored by it because long ago she brought it to its knees. Or perhaps she didn’t do anything but go to Massage Envy, watch Netflix, and virtue signal on Facebook
while her insufferable kids were at school where they’re infallible because Daddy Warbucks pays the outrageous tuition. In any case, she didn’t grab her coat,
just her keys, and she looks at me like I might drag her by the hair from her Kalorama fantasyland in which she just has to trick herself into feeling hunted to feel alive.
Daniel Saalfeld’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Hopkins Review, The Southeast Review, The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The South Carolina Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and The Pinch. A Fulbright Scholar recipient, he lectured on American poetry in Russia. He teaches at the University of Maryland.