Preparing the Apology
Mike Graves
She looked like you.
Slim, in a short shift.
Her breasts were like two heaving moons.
Her cheekbones Slavic,
And her wide eyes warm
Her manner natural.
Her lips full, without lipstick.
Her legs bare
To the middle of her thighs,
Promised ecstatic pleasure.
She looked like you.
Her hair was tied in a simple knot,
Decked with a white blossom.
Her poems were terrible.
I didn’t care...
We lay entangled in her boyfriend’s bed,
Juices leaking out of us.
She looked like you...
Michael Graves is the author of four chapbooks, two of which are digital, and three full-length collections. The chapbooks are Outside St. Jude’s (R. E. M.,1990), Blatnoy (madhattersreview3.com, 2005), Illegal Border Crosser (Cervena Barva, 2008), and Fifteen Villanelles (Robert Perron.com 2020). The full-length books are Adam and Cain and In Fragility (Black Buzzard, 2006, 2011) and A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders: Selected Short Poems of Mike Graves (Nirala, 2017). He has published fifteen poems in The James Joyce Quarterly and has read from his “Joycean Poems” to a gathering of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mark, April 12, 2002. His poem “Apollo to Daphne” appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford, 2001) The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation awarded him a grant in 2006. He organized the conference, Baptism by Fire: The Work of James Wright at Poets House, NY (March 27, 2004). And he has been coordinating and hosting the Phoenix Reading Series for about twenty years.
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