Dear H,

Susan Rich

Dear H,

 
 
How strange to think of you this way—
H as dangerous.
H as demented.
 
I was schooled to crave you
like powdered sugar,
 
or Roman Holiday,
elegant suites with ocean views.
 
The symptoms of my diagnosis?
 
Bright fever of adoration
for another life—
one with more dollars in my pockets.
 
O Happiness, how well you ignore the struggle.
 
Our city is full of false faces,
Italian suits almost no one can afford to buy.
 
One day we’re best friends
and the next you’ve tossed out my number.
 
You’re a mezcal so addictive
all the girls want you—
dazzled by the bright worm of promise.
 
What a flâneur
you turned out to be—
a harlot, a sphinx, a haint of a god.
 
 
 
 

Susan Rich is the author of five books, most recently Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press). She is the winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement Award, London. Her poems have been published in all 50 states including in such journals as the Antioch Review, Field, Harvard Review, New England Review, and World Poetry Today. She is co-founder of Poets on the Coast, a yearly writing retreat that takes place in the Skagit Valley. She lives and writes in Seattle, WA.