June Poem 2020

We Trade Eggs and Olives

Salads arrive. We wince.

I do not like olives,

black or green, and you know it.

Sliced hardboiled eggs

seem to make you gag.

So we trade them. . . .

Citronella and burlap

both seize my breath.

You resuscitate me

with lilac and silks.

Me the morning person

and you wasting midnight oil.

You buried within books,

me searching for rhetoric.

Fault lines in our wiring,

timelines synchronized tonight.

Common ground tilled,

reseeded in one another’s gasp.

—  Sam Barbee