Toned, tanned, and virile.
I shouldn’t be curious—
but I am.

His beau,
a beauty,
at least ten years
his senior—
this I know.

Their proximity,
aflame.
A new relationship,
I’m sure.

Her teen daughter,
an apparition—
disinterested,
yet she endures.

I’m supposed
to lament her—
this, my culture demands.

But instead
I salute her defiance,
while my baked-in hypocrisy
scalds.

Will I ever
scrape my pan clean?
My eyes sting
with its fetid stench.

Meanwhile, I wonder—
is he well-behaved?
Does he allow forgiveness
for millennia
of harm?

Subconsciously,
she mirrors
my position
in her chair.

The cords of sisterhood—
engineered to be,
and to remain,
threadbare.

My guilty interest wraps
around their air like fog.

Why shouldn’t she enjoy
the last of her bodily wealth,
as the sunset of
my own populative use
draws to its final ebb?

To her, a toast—
and to all those women
who courageously scalpel
themselves into being,

a life
the present hasn’t yet woven
and the past
viciously disallowed.