Poem | Not Good Company | Commonweal Magazine

Plastics are on my mind, floods. Any pause
in the conversation, I come up with some
Sorry Business, Aboriginal term for mourning.
Doleful, that’s me, no small talk, not unpleasant,
but my idea of intimate is apt to be some
terrible statistic. I can’t say Susan
is feeling better or Eileen’s arm is mending
without adding but she has a preexisting condition
or but she’s got no insurance (as if getting the facts
straight makes it all right). I’ve got no banter,
I’m all judgement and edges, an edgy white lady
wondering what to do, what to do next
as in Jesus is coming, look busy.

Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City high-school English teacher. She has published two collections of poems, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring, and two chapbooks, The Family Profile and New Lebanon. The eighth line of this poem is from Elizabeth Willis’s poem, “And What My Species Did.” “Ruin from the air” is a reference to the book by the same name, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.