Julie Marie Wade
Poetry
Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires, Postage Due, When I Was Straight, Catechism: A Love Story, SIX, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, and—forthcoming in 2019—The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, co-authored with Denise Duhamel. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus.
Portrait of Regret as a Door-to-Door Salesman
See him straightening his tie?
See him brushing dandruff
from his shoulders, fingers
passing through his rumpled hair?
Hello, Ma’am, are you the lady of the house?
Rumpelstiltskin, more like: spinning straw into gold—
peddling lapis lazuli for a fool’s price.
I have some encyclopedias here I’m only too happy to show you.
(Or 35 styles of Tupperware. Or sailboats admirably bottled.)
You pass your hand through the flap in the
tattered screen door. He squeezes your palm till it’s sore.
What’s a man gotta do in a town like this to get himself a fresh cup of coffee?
He has a foot in now. You’re proud
of your coffee, percolating on the counter since dawn.
It just so happens, he says, I’m runnin’ a two-for-one-special today.
26 books for the price of 13. Don’t have to skip a letter.
His front teeth bared; the crooked yellow gleam.
Scent of Old Spice and shoe polish.
Nice place you got here. Might have to take my shoes off, sit a spell.
Look there, through the parlor.
See how he stretches his scrawny legs?
See how he splays his heels on your window ledge?
Notice the hole in his sock that, sooner or later,
he’ll ask you to darn.
So tell me, Miss Lily, is there a Mister?
Ichabod Crane, more like: insatiable appetite—
I saved you a seat (patting the davenport pillow).
You’re flustered now, tugging your apron strings,
ankles wobbling in your shoes. To cover, you offer him
spice cake, a blunt knife, a small plate of butter.
You know, he says, feed a man this good (wiping the smug
swirl of his mouth), he’s liable to stay forever.
“ ‘Portrait of Regret as a Door-to-Door Salesman’ is part of a series of portrait-poems I began writing years ago after my friend James Allen Hall published his first collection, Now You're the Enemy. I was inspired by James's use of portraiture as a way to build and explore two seemingly disparate entities in light of each other—for instance, his stunning ‘Portrait of My Mother as the Republic of Texas’ and ‘Portrait of My Mother as Rosemary Woodhouse.’ In both of these poems, the reader comes to understand the speaker's mother deeply while also learning about the history of Texas, the film Rosemary's Baby, and the speaker, too—whose intellect and imagination have paired the mother with these things. In my emulations, I wanted to pair emotionally charged but abstract nouns like regret, jealously, lust, and grief with people, places, and things that are notably concrete. Regret strikes me as a very persuasive, charismatic emotion, but what regret has to offer is ultimately useless. The way regret foists itself upon us as human beings mulling over past decisions, past mistakes, reminded me of a salesman peddling that proverbial ‘bag of goods’—which led to this poem. ”