Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash
Your lips, a white horse
rescuing damsels from dangerous
silence, condescending kittens out of trees.
Well-intentioned tidbits,
shielding me from the street-side
of the sidewalk.
Adjacent to me at the sushi bar, your mouth
runneth over with syllables explaining
what I already know—
Steely Dan was named after a sex toy—
other times, what I may not even care
about—the Austrian economic school
contraposits egalitarian tenets of objective value—
and sometimes in the grocery store coffee aisle, pointing
out what I just said, now in your own words:
more rainfall sweetens a roast.
Well actually,
it’s a fact men gift us
with twenty-five percent more
words in work meetings than women.
Generous verbosity. On dates you interrupt
doors for me. Slay dragons with your opinion.
Where would I be if you hadn’t told
me: Bernanke destroyed the American dollar,
Hillary was a technocrat, marriage is capitalist,
pine is the best wood to whittle a spoon,
or that I should avoid eating lectins?
So smooth is your speech, like my freshly
exfoliated lips that I wish you would shut up
and kiss instead of giving an oral history
on the discography of Guided By Voices.
Chivalry isn’t dead until a man tells a woman so.
Valerie Nies (she/her/hers) is a comedian, writer, and gluten enthusiast whose poetry and humor have been featured in McSweeney's, Reductress, and Oddball Magazine. Find her in Austin, Texas, scanning WebMD and ridding her clothing of cat hair. She’s also on Twitter/IG @valerieknees and at valerienies.com.