Courtney Queeney: “The Other Woman”
THE OTHER WOMAN
When he wandered from the room
I imagined he’d been kidnapped.
What kind of ransom would I rally
for his rescue? Kidnapped,
or on the phone with his girlfriend.
How would I grieve? I watched TV
until he slouched back into the couch,
where we stared at a building
exploding. At some point he said
I always thought we’d end up together,
the screen’s blue light almost pretty,
almost like clouds tatting temporary
shadows across his face in a park, where maybe
we were staging a picnic, and not the glare
of the skyscraper shrugging into rubble.
It was such a bizarre thing to say.
Courtney Queeney’s book Filibuster to Delay a Kiss was published by Random House in 2007. Her work has been published by American Poetry Review, the American Poetry Society of America’s Poem-a-Day series, The Believer, Black Warrior Review, McSweeney’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Times, as well as other journals and anthologies.