Ralph Monday- Two Poems

The Collectors

No matter where they meet,
in office, bar, anywhere in between,
it doesn’t take them long,
a night or maybe a couple of
weeks sharing narcissistic
sorrows, common hates or
likes—series of vignettes
and they know they have
fallen into something even
though they know their pets
better.

This is the moment when
fire blooms. They become
gliding dancers with hooked fingers
exploring each body mystery
through blood-shot
gray groans, a
fever monument burnt by
brunette darkness.

They dance between the sheets
in waves like promises spinning
on a top—love become a snow
revolution withered away in a
dawn or two.

They never realize they buck
and thrust in a theater where
only flat soda is served.

Virused figures, kisses become
petrified white bone, closed
text to tone stubbling
masochists’ epistemology—

creatures that could not be
consoled in this washed out
albino love, the search for a
filthy savior to save them from
themselves.

This is a pew they will not sit
in again when they part
like a fissured glacier,
love orphans without gestation
sharing ambiguous nights,
now eyeing the basket holder
strolling down the aisle,
giving promised body coin as love

offering to the new collector.

How to Write a True Love Poem

First, you have to be heartbroken
at least three times by three
different men or women,
which is easy any time after
the 60s.

Open a gold embossed book
of old poems and pray to
Satan to show you the way,
but only if Satan comes in
the form of a woman like
Elizabeth Hurley in
Bedazzled

wearing a red plaid school girl
skirt, like a good Catholic,
is a necessity.

Satan says to you through a
very good perfume, I know
how many times you have
been betrayed and how many
times more you will be betrayed.

That’s what makes love so special,
just ask those expert trollops Helen
or Dido or Delilah, and most
especially that snake-charmer, Eve.

You aren’t especially enamored
by Satan as a chick because
you vaguely remember something
from high school about Job or
Faust or the love inquisition
with creepy old men, how they
all kissed Lucy or something,
and got all dungeon S&M.

Nevertheless, Satan puts on
the pearly whites and purifies
the moment, clever devil.

Look through your old online
pics, select the one that still
hurts the most. I’ll make the
pain go away.

How’s that joy boy?

Easy, just stroke my tits
while imagining that they are
hers. See how mine droop
and are flat like a pricked balloon?
Finger me and smell the dead
odors. Stroke my belly inflated
like a medicine ball, think of
all the men that have pierced
her since you, left their marks
like permanent tattoos, abandoned
her after the pimp job.

See how her teeth is falling with
her hair, how she weeps each
night thinking of you.

How lost in in her misbegotten
feminist fantasies that she will
always be looking for the next
dude, the next gal, that will
bed her for a time and move on,
and she ends up alone looking like
the above, wondering what
the hell happened.

Now, that’s love, true true love—
as pure as a munchkin on the
yellow brick road.



Ralph Monday is an Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing courses. In fall 2013 he had poems published in The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Fiction Week Literary Review, and was represented as the featured poet with 12 poems in the December issue of Poetry Repairs. In winter 2014 he had poems published in Dead Snakes. Summer 2014 had a poem in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology of Best Present Day Poems. His work has appeared in publications such as The Phoenix, Bitter Creek Review, Full of Crow, Impressions, Kookamonga Square, Deep Waters, Jacket Magazine, The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, cc&d, Crack the Spine, The Camel Saloon, Dead Snakes, Jellyfish Whispers, Pyrokinection, Red River Review, Burningword  and Poetry Repairs. Featured Poet of the week May, 2014 Poetry Super Highway. Forthcoming: Poems in Blood Moon Rising. Crack the Spine best of anthology and Down in the Dirt Magazine. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Houghton Mifflin’s “Best of” Anthologies, as well as other awards. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014.