she had one bandaged knee above white socks,
and I was in love, so I raced home to type my
thoughts, unlatching the typewriter case, lugging

out the ten-pound 1960 Smith Corona, inserting a
misaligned onionskin vellum as thin as my psyche,
pounding on the circle keys, each stroke of the strikers

catching in mangled messes jumbled like my
misaligned love, then the keystrokes wham, wham,
“o how do i love thee sharon, from your toes to your nose,”

the curved bowl of each “e” aslant, the descending vertical
“y” beneath the base inkless, my “t” bar missing, my cap
lock perpetually stuck in lowercase, the eleven counters

within the “o’s” struck with such assertion that holes
were torn through the thin paper creating ciphers into
my preteen soul, almost all the letters smudged so that

the paper reflected me confirmed me, and I tore the paper
out, the cylinder spinning contempt, and wadded the paper
into a ball of angst tossed on the floor and kicked under my bed

Steve Gerson, an emeritus English professor from a Midwestern community college, writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance and dynamism. He’s proud to have published in Panoplyzine (winning an Editor’s Choice award), The Hungry Chimera, Toe Good, The Write Launch, Route 7, Duck Lake, Coffin Bell, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, Riza Press, White Wall Review, Variant, Abstract, Pinkley Press, Montana Mouthful, and In Parenthesis.