The best response to the request for a #love #poem #MondayBlogs

Response to a Request for a Love Poem

by Vincent Francone 

My wife wears her gold earrings in the summer nights

going to dance wearing black looking like the small hours 

her skin the cinnamon of angry skies.

Her eyes match her clothing 

which she wears like fog combing over the skyline.

Her fingers are peninsulas 

her back is a map with rivers from my fingers

her feet hold her to the earth 

her toes are painted like beach-washed stones

her hair falls like empires 

or is coiled like the center of a sunflower.

She wears her hair off her shoulders

and I never fail to lock onto what little memory remains 

of our first careless ardor

while she meanders through our conflict 

taking her time to make up her mind

as assiduously as she works on her make up.

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi.

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Read a review for Like a Dog: 

A Chicago critic once asked Nelson Algren," Why can't we ever read about happy marriages?" Algren replied, "Because there are none."
Like a Dog shows us the same can be said of the average job. Francone leads us from a purgatorial mail sorting job on the South Side to a rat-infested North Side bookstore (where a budding writer can find a kind of happiness), and finally into academia, where so many writers are forced to labor. Well-told stories, original characters, lots of laughs.