When my girlfriend’s other girlfriend
comes over for dinner with my housemate,
and my housemate, en route from the grill
to the kitchen, invites me to the picnic table,
I am not confused or upset. I sit
behind my sunglasses, tonguing
the cucumbers sliced to transparency
in the salad. I swallow the peppers
and lettuce, the peppered halibut,
and watch my girlfriend’s other girlfriend
discuss with my housemate the making
of a replacement guard for a miter saw,
how her mannish hands approximate
the thought. I snap at my housemate
when she asks me to pass the bread, but I
do not weigh stabbing them both with a dirty fork
against bleeding myself in the flower bed.
So seldom these hot, backyard days.
Fresh is the halibut, soft as butter, soft
and salty, white as the clouds that are not
in the blue, blue sky from which the sun
burns us all without distinction.