“One Day I Suddenly Notice,” by Daisy Fried

“One Day I Suddenly Notice,” by faculty member Daisy Fried, was recently published by the Poetry Foundation.

One Day I Suddenly Notice

Abstract for a happy poem

You made your students write stories about happiness and they were, you said, the worst stories of the year. Remember the pregnant woman? in a Fontainebleau café, I meant to reset it in America when I wrote the poem, she was sordid with mammalian culmination, dissatisfied with the first table she chose, the chair, with too much too hot sun soaking her through the picture window, she gathered crockery, groceries, her unsatisfactory handbag in order to move but the space between tables was small and the deadweight of  her near-term baby in the moonbounce of  her body made her clumsy, trip, fall, splash, and spill her au lait into a man’s open laptop.

 His screen went blank. She broke into tears. Him so angry and sorry for her he couldn’t speak. He lifted the milk-glopped computer out of the coffee; it dripped viscous stalactites onto the table and his knees and the floor, pooling around tasseled, perforated loafers. The woman at the end of  her tether. Tears dribbled down her face to her blouse and into the now-empty cup she swooped over to pick up nearly losing her balance. That happens pregnant: you forget for a minute and the front weight shocks you. The man, scrunched up in an expensive embroidered sweater, navy, thread beads, intricate, abstract in pattern, with thighs to make you think of sex, was heavy too with urgency to save circuitry, get back to his important work, money work, stocks work, smoke-and-mirrors work, rather like poetry, without forgiveness or incivility. His earpiece lighting up with calls he didn’t take.

Find the rest of this poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152097/one-day-i-suddenly-notice-1