Wallis Simpson Writes to Her Ex-Husband Ernest After Listening to King Edward Abdicate over the Radio

by Shelley Puhak

If only my hands were dainty. Is it that I am so gifted or
so ghosted? I am more surprised than you, darling, to find

myself over-butlered and writing this on an oversized chaise
and even when I heave the springs won’t give. I am surprised

to do without you, as if I was a child, me, who never was a child,
trying to sift out light from a stream, surprised when the current

pried my fingers apart. The floors tilted and the ceiling dipped,
but all of the East End could fit in our flat. Sweetness. Because

we were sweet. Remember our old chaise, worn with my
wallowing? I’d wake to you, Evening Standard underarm and

we’d strain its springs with our congeniality. Until you ducked
out for a smoke. Until they started claiming the answer lay

in my hands: I pried a king away with the Shanghai Squeeze,
the China Clinch, or the Baltimore Grip.

Shelley Puhak is the author of Stalin in Aruba (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2010 Towson Prize for Literature, and the chapbook The Consolation of Fairy Tales, winner of the 2011 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. Individual poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southeast Review, and many other journals. She currently serves as Writer-in-Residence for Notre Dame of Maryland University.