Shopping for Love
Let’s go shopping for love.
At the mall, at the bar,
at the gym, at work,
anywhere, really, even in yoga class.
Specials today: one-night stands,
serial non-committers,
bored spouses imagining
what might have been
with former flames,
calling them up after years
of silence to ask:
are you, you know, happy?
Here’s the bargain bin:
the folks with multiple divorces
formerly rich as all get-out
and gorgeous, now crushed
by paying alimony galore.
Shoppers keep cruising the aisles
searching for love that warms
like cashmere. Love that slides
and floats, without baggage,
but improbably signals
depth and longevity.
When they get that certain look,
you can tell they’ve picked out a new one.
I’ll take it, they say, over and over,
trying on partners who don’t quite fit,
who tend to shrink or fade
soon after being brought home.
But these shoppers are undeterred.
A failure just hurries them along to the next
attempt. They don’t care a bit about the cost.
They don’t even look at the price tag.
Susan Wolbarst’s poems are nothing like Edgar Allan Poe’s. For starters, they are written and edited on a computer. There are several additional differences which she won’t bore you by delineating. Susan is a newspaper reporter in rural Gualala, California. Her poetry has been published in Plainsongs, pioneertownlit.com, Naugatuck River Review, and other digital and print journals. Five of her poems were included in the Canadian anthology “Alchemy and Miracles, nature woven into words.” A chapbook of her poems called It’s Over was published in September 2025 by Finishing Line Press.
The Marbled Sigh 