Volume 69, Number 1 · Fall 2019
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Mild Disturbance After Reading Kim Addonizio

Florence Weinberger

At 5 p.m. one afternoon I said to myself
it’s time to bake my potato

and couldn’t think why it sounded dirty.
I had been reading Kim Addonizio

and wanted to talk to her about orgasms
how it doesn’t matter

once you’re past eighty
unless you have a young lover

which I don’t, and don’t want
anymore.

I had a friend
whose lover was younger than her kids.

She had to pick up after him.
Of course, it’s the same with the old ones

who won’t pick up their wet towels
or wait for my orgasm.

Living alone, baking potatoes,
setting the table for one,

I bless this harsh freedom, no one
to pass me the sour cream.

Pass me the sour cream, I say to myself.

Florence Weinberger is the author of five published collections of poetry, the most recent Ghost Tattoo, which was published by Tebot Bach. She has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, and her poetry appears in a number of literary magazines, including the Comstock Review, the Antietam Review, the Rockvale Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Solo, Rattle, the Baltimore Review, Calyx, Miramar, River Styx, Another Chicago Magazine, the North American Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her poems have also been published in many anthologies.