Bernadette Mayer

[from Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets, Tender Buttons, NYC, 1984]

Sonnet

A thousand apples you might put in your theories
But you are gone from benefit my love

You spoke not the Italian of Dante at the table
But the stingy notions of the bedded heterosexual

You curse and swore cause I was later
To come home to you without your fucking dinner

Dont ever return su numero de telefono it is just this
I must explain I dont ever want to see you again

Empezando el 2 de noviembre 1980-something I dont love you
So stick it up your ass like she would say

I'm so mad at you I'm sure I'll take it all back tomorrow
& say then they flee from me who sometime did me seek

Meanwhile eat my existent dinner somebody and life
C'mon and show me something newer than even Dante