Triptych in Gendered Endings

I. Saunteress

To make a break for it
this sought-after blink-and-you’ll-miss-it

meetcute

I cue up what I’ve taken to calling
this epithalamium for runaway brides

I queue up for a dewy petal
to be placed on my tongue

eucharistically famished
electrically charged

Uncharacteristic as is the method
of its delivery I find a way

to twist a petal into an origami swan

II. Trobairitz

This singsong wandering lulls me and my passersby
into traffic where every car becomes a pillow

every truck a smooch
every red light a wish

What I’m after is to turn my voicebox
into a treasure trove where you can store

every trashy precious thing
and for every transaction to guarantee

a better night’s sleep insofar as
every blessed ruin becomes a proper tucking in

III. Flâneuse

In praise of levitation like the moviemusicals
condition us to labor under as if a starsign

I give myself to jonesing after jonquil bulbs

thereby replacing my habits end over end
topsyturvy crossaddict I am yet hold at bay

At the end of the day I want to disappear

into the day itself and to proliferate
into a crowd swallowing its sacrosanct dithering

A muted flourish but a flourish nonetheless

Jacob Schepers is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project 2014) whose poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Verse, Heavy Feather Review, Burning House Press, Midway Journal, A-Minor, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of ballast and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

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