By Leslie Morris

Featured Image: Forget the Flowers by Tanner Pearson

Twenty-six years have passed since you tried
out mattresses at Macy’s, hands folded over
your chests as if laid out for a viewing. No,
that was not how you lay on a mattress at home.
You had read in the paper that couples who rated
their marriages “satisfying,” slept spooning
and those who rated their marriages “highly satisfying”
slept spooning with their hands cupping their spouse’s
breast or penis, so nightly you wrapped your hand around
his sturdy cock believing that you secured a happy marriage
in your grasp. But after googling “how to” diagrams
of spooning on the web, you’ve learned that as the smaller spoon
you should have been the spoonee all those years.
So now you are shopping for mattresses by yourself
and the sleep expert at Slumberland wants to upsell you
a queen even though you are still weepy and lost
in your own trough within a double, a sinkhole
of busted continuous coils. He asks how you sleep.
Badly. You need something supportive, he says,
but with plenty of give. Yes, absolutely!
Memory foam, he says. Oh God, no. Knock me out
on horsehair or kapok, sheep fleece or pea shucks.
Give me a nightcap of nepenthe. Certainly not memory.

Leslie Morris’ poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review miCRo Series, Entropy, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.