Late Friday Afternoon Visit by D.C. Buschmann

Cradling her beer bottle
like she feared
it’d get gone,

she greeted me with a smirky smile.
The eyes,
I don’t want to remember.

Her late-70s legs, shapely as a cheerleader’s,
sidled up to her bottom
on her smart new recliner.

Compensating for wine-budget priorities,
her ceiling fan sliced the heat
like a desperate machete.

Veteran bug-eyed shih tzu, staring
from across the room,
knew best.                 

Held captive, I listened
to her spirits-infused verbosity—
a scene with more violins

than a D-rated soap opera
that I quickly pushed
buttons past at home.

Even today, five years later, my scorched
ears reel, tail feathers smolder.
She complains that I never visit.

D.C. Buschmann is retired. Her poem, “Death Comes for a Friend,” was the Editor’s Choice in Poetry Quarterly, Winter 2018. She has been a finalist in several essay and poetry contests, but has never won anything. Her work appears in anthologies in the US, the UK, Australia, Iraq, and India and has been in or will appear in Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library’s So it Goes Literary Journal, Flying Island, Poppy Road Review, San Pedro River Review, The Great American Wise Ass by Lamar University Press, Rat’s Ass Review, Nerve Cowboy, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook is being pondered.