Just Sayin’
(with apologies to William Carlos Williams)
Yes, the plums that you ate were for breakfast, my mate,
so you’ll have to make do with this scrapple.
Just fry it—don’t boil it!—in butter or oil. It
is hog-offal awful. The apple
you renounced for the plums as too tough for your gums
(or perhaps just because you’re malicious),
I devoured this morning while reading your warning.
It was sweet, cold and truly delicious.
No, I shall not forgive you as long as I live, you
are selfish and rude, and what’s worse,
you could not take the time to use meter and rhyme,
but confessed in prosaic free verse!
Catherine Chandler is the author of four collections of poems, most recently The Frangible Hour (University of Evansville Press), winner of the 2016 Richard Wilbur Award. Her poems, reviews, translations, and essays have been widely published in journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. She is a recipient of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and The Lyric‘s Leslie Mellichamp and Quarterly Awards, and has recently been a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her work has garnered eight Pushcart Prize nominations, and her first collection, Lines of Flight, was shortlisted for the Poets’ Prize in 2013.