Lois Harrod: Two Poems

Now I Want You Softly

the way a thief enters in the night,
sliding open the French doors
leaving his shoes on the mat,

moving his black pants and black sweater
down the hall, no more than a shadow
on the foyer wall

but his socks whispering softly to the floor
so that I hear him approaching,
can imagine his hand floating

up the banister and dropping to his side
at the landing, see him through
my lashes, standing at the bedroom door

a blacker velvet than the black portal.
It doesn’t matter so much
any more that he brings

what I want, the wild pleasure of slaking
what is his, only the sweet joy
of seeing him

desiring the little trinkets I have left.
Take, I say, whatever you want,
whatever you can steal away.

***

Misogyny in the Early Twenty-first Century

The misogynist likes to think well of himself,

does volunteer work in spare hours, gives

his $63 a year to the Alzheimer’s Association,

finds time to visit his mother once a year

in the Tucson nursing home where she

no longer knows his name, allows his frumpy sisters

to do the frequent flying, deal with caretakers,

but does worry that dear old Mom has bequeathed him

that ApoE 4 gene along with the rundown cottage

along the Tuscarora River. He keeps fit, twice a week walks

the nameless hounds, bounders, dobers, and rots

whiling their time away at the Pittsburgh Animal Shelter,

knows that women like men who like dogs

though the paid shelter workers, fat slobs, remind him

some dogs are born vicious, oh, he’s met

so many, some half his age, high breasts

and haunches, they pull so at the leash

that during the block or two round he takes

above the city, they almost jerk his shoulder

from the socket. He complains about pain,

why just last night he picked up what he thought

was a real fox, glossy hair, puppy eyes, but the workers

never tell him which ones are destroyed

which ones are adopted, and before sex she wants to talk,

all that meatless yapping about her career

a raki therapist and reader for the blind,

and under the degrees and bruises, her deep Zen,

just one more charity bitch.

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Lois Marie Harrod’s 11th book Brief Term, poems about teaching, was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.