You know, I know a guy who doesn’t like
his wife at all. He gets home Monday night
from making cars; she greets him. “Hello, Mike—”
He sort of nods at her and settles right
into his Laz-E-Boy to watch the game.
While Denver loses twenty-four to six
he heaves a sigh and places all the blame
for his unhappiness on her. A mix
of dirty shirts and unwashed pants is all
she really gets to see of him. She knows
he’d rather have some twenty-something (tall
and wrinkle-free) with fingers on his clothes.
Her husband trapped her on her wedding day.
She always folds his laundry anyway.

—David Jackson Lohnes
1999

Notes:

I wrote this my senior year for the Valentine’s Day poetry contest sponsored by my college newspaper (I was a staff writer). I had studied some of Shakespeare’s sonnets the semester before and wanted to write a modern love sonnet focused on commitment in marital love even when emotions are gone. At the time I didn’t like the final couplet, and I fiddled with it on several occasions after resulting finally in the current version. (DL, Dec. 10, 2022)