Therapy Office, Late Afternoon
Vacant chair,
the very time of day
you’d be sighing, flopping
onto its soft black vinyl
shoes off, grand gestures, vivid words
facial contortions depicting
how your life careened around corners
endless crises, rejections, humiliations,
sudden loves, abrupt hatreds
the bitters of regret
hollows of disappointment.
You were a mess, but a lovable one
a hopeful one, and frankly
not that far from my own
daily turbulences which I’d manage
to contain before your arrival,
and which would rise up stinging
after you left, we were so similar
you and I, me pushing so hard for you
to pull yourself together,
cry out your hurts, shout outrage,
I sobbed with you
for all that could never be undone.
When you stopped coming it was a shock
I’m still not over it
there’d been progress, not dramatic,
change is slow
when we looked upon each other
for the final time, only you
knew these were our last moments
only you could not say goodbye
as I am doing now.
The Vow
You called yourself mundane
run of the mill nothing special
but not to me, your name, Wanda,
the spangled spells you cast
anything but ordinary.
Oh, magical Wanda
can you blame me
for pursuing you through
crammed high school hallways
across bucolic college quads
till you’d had just about enough
of my deliciously delirious wooden-
headed dreams, you turned
to the fat frat guy with the jazzy
green car, salesman smile and solid future
you beamed at his florid face
left me heaving up bitter chunks
of longing. What the fuck was I thinking?
You couldn’t see me at all, couldn’t see
the dumb purity streaming unchecked
from my blind heart for the first and
last time.
Matt Fried is a fiction writer, poet and psychologist. He received his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short fiction has appeared in Pulphouse and 166 Palms: A Literary Anthology. He studied poetry with the poet Colette Inez. His CD of original songs, Days of Hope, can be heard on Apple Music, Spotify Pandora and YouTube. His psychological articles have appeared in the following publications: Psychiatry, Transformance and The Feldenkrais Journal. In addition to writing poems, He’s working on his first novel.
The Marbled Sigh 