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
