As I watched her being whipped by her mistress
on the lawn glowing rings necklaced the dancers
crowding to a circle and the Vegas sky flashed
strobes and her notched welts popped pink and ropey
and the hour wasn’t as dark as some I’ve known
with laughter near the empty pool—no one swims
on such a night and sleep’s a small café
no one enters and I recalled the Alexandrian bar
where Cavafy met a boy waiter, how a blond
resembling my ex-wife danced with a pink haired go-go
but when I looked again it was morning, the twenty-four
year old vanished and I was sleeping beneath a ceiling
I’d never seen and along the boulevard on that hotel
balcony where the desert exalts in memory and is forever
Copyright © 2025 by David Mura. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
