A Belated Poetry Friday on Sunday (and other stuff)

I am so lucky to be happily married to a sweet, funny, normal man. This as opposed to my first husband. I was single in between marriages for ten years. But in those years, I was involved with some pretty "interesting" guys. Or as my mother would call them, "colorful characters." A friend of mine is having doubts about her 15 year marriage. Understand, this is her third marriage. In an email exchange, she weighed the pros and cons of divorcing this husband and trying to find another man to share her life with. The idea of dating in my 50s is horrifying and, quite frankly, exhausting. I advised her to get a dog instead. So, in honor of the dating life, I give you this week's poem:

Ex-Boyfriends, by Kim Addonizio

They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they're drunk, or finally get sober,

they're passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,
your good dogs or bad boys, and they're over
you now. one writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They're getting married

and want you to be the first to know,
or they've been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don't miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes
where they're buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,
propped on an elbow, giving you a look
of fascination, a look that says I can't believe

I've found you. It's the same way
your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,
before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark
broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs
of headlights from the freeway's passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,
hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,
following the familiar routes of their loneliness.
"Ex-Boyfriends" by Kim Addonizio,