OBVIOUSLY A SHITTY DREAM
We’re at your wedding to alcoholism
the invitation features so many photos of your face
framed by branches
I think you are getting married to a tree
I enter the banquet hall
and Vincent the MC makes me
change into a stretchy fuchsia dress
gives me a lollipop
I’m sexy and chubby
he warns me Kim is here
skinny and off sugar
at the end of the reception
you weakly smile as you visit my table
tell me David was supposed to be your best man
but has been hard to reach lately
I wake up and think either you got a girlfriend
or are dying
Author’s Bio
Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Pinch, The Fiddlehead, glitterMOB, The Puritan, PRISM, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Renaissance Normcore, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in fall 2019.