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.