by Gale Acuff

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I don’t love you, I say to my wife, on
our honeymoon, anymore, as if I
ever did or she did me. It’s practice
for when sometime down the line, say fifteen
or thirty or fifty years from now, I
have to say it after suppressing it
for all that time or explode and didn’t
I already more or less betray the
truth long ago? And then we make love like
there’s no tomorrow and even though there
isn’t, our eyes open to the dawn and
before we know what we’re doing we’re at
it again. And when we make love once more, she
tells me that she hates me. But lovingly.

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Gale Acuff has been published in Slant, the Arkansas Review, and several other literary journals. He is the author of three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel, The Weight of the World, and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse Press) and teaches university English in the Palestinian West Bank.