Heidi Seaborn

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Heidi Seaborn

The Affair

 
A party—
Stepping out into the jasmine night.
She’d read his latest play. He’d seen her movies.

When his letters arrived like weather,
she wore a coat in summertime.

Seasons leafed along like that.
He appeared one evening wearing

the tie his wife had knotted.
They had dinner.

Windows closed around them.
Their candlelit bodies shuttered.

When morning sunk her teeth,
they drank each other again,

the day severed from all
others. They collected

these days into a home with no keys.
She bathed in his voice—

words slipping down the drain
into his palms.

They washed themselves, their history—
bedsheets billowing. They forgot

how a clothesline tells a story to
strangers, the neighbors, his wife

passing by on a Sunday drive.
They gathered up their cottoned days

& walked out into the afternoon sun
together, blinking.
 

Heidi Seaborn reads “The Affair”


Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of [PANK] Book Award winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (2021), Give a Girl Chaos (2019) and the 2020 Comstock Review Prize Chapbook, Bite Marks. Recent work in American Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The Slowdown with Tracy K. Smith, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com