You always hog the blankets
and steal my magazines.
No need to ask what smells so rank–
it’s you, the king of beans.

Your toenails cut my shin.
You blow your nose: I jump.
I’m sanded by your bristly chin,
then bulldozed by your rump.

You scratch your back and sigh,
you grunt, harrumph and bray.
And yet the crazy truth is I
can’t sleep when you’re away.

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain writes: “As with many of my poems, I owe my husband for being a good sport about seeing such things in print.  And I owe Light‘s founding editor, John Mella, who advised adding a foot to the third line of each stanza, for a 3-3-4-3 pattern. (That pattern has a name that I don’t recall. Could someone please remind me?)”

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010. She will teach a three-day workshop on comic poetry at the Poetry by the Sea conference in Madison, CT, in May 2024.

Photo: “#oneperson #AdultsOnly #onlywomen #onewomanonly #people #Adult !indoors #humanbodypart #Bed #realpeople #BlackBackground #closeup #day #awakenings” by nikdanna is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.