Gloria Parker

In The Good Old Days

When acronyms were few, I couldn’t have
cared less what they stood for. I wasn't frivolous...
I was nine.

I C B M would have been a fourth-grade giggle...
poop jokes were just our speed. I'd've been a hit.

The one time I said shit aloud, my father raced up
the steps and shoved a bar of soap into my mouth.

Not that he didn't say it all the time...what is this shit...
who needs this shit...clean this shit up, goddamnit!

But back to acronyms.  There are thousands now,
and it'd be easier to keep track of the nicknames
in a Russian novel.

POTUS sounds funny, but isn't, yet easy to remember...
just think bone spurs...FLOTUS... a gassy issue,

and SCOTUS, which might be good for a laugh
if it wasn't a life term venereal disease.

 

Ironing

It's five a.m. and I'm at the ironing board,
possibly asleep, and if so, when I wake,
the eight pressed shirts I have on hangers
will vanish and I'll have to start over.

Or if I am awake, I'll have spent the last two
hours ruminating...seeing what ironies I might
iron out in an attempt to make my life wrinkle free.

What's on my mind? Ancient stuff: I'm not quite
old enough to go to kindergarten and it's lunch time.
I'm eating my noodles and ketchup...Mom's turning
pages in a magazine and biting her cuticles.

She looks up long enough to read me a few lines
about how Nazis made lampshades. I have no idea
what a Nazi is or if my skin is Jewish, but I do
know dread.

Is irony the word I'm looking for? Maybe not.
So what should I call it when the person who
drove me mad is shocked that I am? Was I her
only audience? My brother says no...we all were...

and that I have to understand...even an ocean away,
WW2 happened only to her. But it's 2022, and I am
standing at an ironing board before dawn, still stuck
in the forties.

Previously published in Tipton Poetry Journal

 

Gloria Parker is a retired primary school teacher. Her poems have appeared
in Prairie Schooner, Margie, Slipstream, Rattle, Loch Raven Review, Paterson
Literary Review, Nimrod, Twelve Mile Review,  Hiram Poetry Journal, Tipton
Poetry Journal, Gyroscope, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.