Sweetmeat
Wheels roll to a parking space close to the bar with dressy drinkers. A beer and a scotch
are drunk with a woman’s rum and Cokes. Above the dark wood floor, her British
luxuriates. Leather soles cross cobblestones. Silk Cut cigarettes from London lie on a coffee
table’s glass top. Off her bronzed Italian- vacation skin, musky perfume varnishes my torso.
Cars below hum along a foggy canal. Morning is served late by a diplomatic blond
bumblebee who sits on a cushioned throne, painting her nails, making big, malleable jokes.
A Baboon Gets Some Flamingo
Over my scrambled eggs, I pause when the pink plumage of flamingos catches my eye. These hundreds of birds don’t notice a baboon’s ugly hairiness in their midst because he’s a stone. Then the scene goes into slowmo
and shows him lunging after them. He misses a lot, but then the fucker claws one down as it’s trying to fly away. He bites its neck and drags it through a stream while it helplessly flails its wings until he gets it under a tree and chomps.
Daniel Saalfeld’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Hopkins Review, The Southeast Review, The Seattle Review, Cimarron 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.