The Year I Stopped Enjoying Seeing My Wife Naked
by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue


I flinch when I see her arms now
bent and thin as where you grip a bat.
Her fingers once so soft
are now bent like bare branches

after a winter storm,
swollen at the joints
like knots on a tree.
Slowly mutating with each passing year,
more and more Dafne-esque.

Hard to imagine her
as she once was, a sylph.
Honestly it takes all of me,
though even then sometimes I can't.

A picture in my mind: Inks Lake, 1985,
a woman hurt by another man,
looks up at me.
I free fall into her eyes,
deep and malachite.





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