JEFF FRIEDMAN

Under the Ramada Moon

In her 60s bouffant wig
and jeweled glasses, Myra sings
to the pink house by an alligator creek—
a for-sale sign on the lawn.
She sings to her husband, long
gone into the crowded palmettos
on Lake Worth.

Under a Ramada moon, She sings
Barbara Streisand while her fingertips
graze the Yamaha’s 88 keys, sings to her third,
fourth and fifth manhattans as she pumps the piano’s
clunky sustain pedal and tries to forget her son’s
cries for help and her daughter’s brown eyes,
hungry for something that Myra can’t give her.

Myra sings “The Way We Were” to a man
who resembles her husband, perched
Bogart-like on a bar stool,
the notes vibrating in the craters
of the Ramada’s plastic moon,
and the man, drunk on his own laughter, sings back,
“Blue skies Smilin’ at me,
nothin’ but blue skies do I see.”

Myra spills her Manhattan,
staining her prized red satin dress.
She sings the story of their next
epic move, the son pacing and packing
the U-Haul, her daughter
picking through the clothes and pictures,
and Myra singing, “Blue
skies, nothing to see, blue
skies no longer smiling at me…”

JEFF FRIEDMAN has published nine collections of poetry and prose, including The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017), and most recently The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis, April 2022), cowritten with Meg Pokrass. Friedman’s poems, mini tales and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Plume, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022 and 2023. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes.