Aubade
by Gordon Mitchell Smith
Lazing naked in our two-night four-post,
drunk on our monthly cottagecore weekend
before the mimosas and the biscuits,
before the tender parting eyefucks, please
show me again your wedding band; tell me
here on our altar of bodily prayer
of the sacrament waiting back at home,
the miracle of love you keep alive.
Jealous me again with your family,
with the closeness, habits, and rituals
you and I will never have; tell me now,
one supplemented spouse to a lover
that we may affirm our plain arrangement
as one of addition, not evasion
or distraction from something suffering,
too hard from which to walk away alone.
Tell me again, here in our satin sea,
that we are goodnesses in two good lives
and not each other’s life preservers, not
the last gasping grasps of two drowning souls.
Gordon Mitchell Smith is a poet, writer, and wine professional. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Palette Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Columbia Poetry Review, MumberMag, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Monica, California.