Video Blues

By Mary Jo Salter b. 1954

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

and likes to rent her movies, for a treat.

It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

The list of actresses who might employ

him as their slave is too long to repeat.

(My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, coy

Jean Arthur with that voice as dry as wheat ...)

It makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Does he confess all this just to annoy

a loyal spouse? I know I can’t compete.

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy.

And can’t a woman have her dreamboats? Boy,

I wouldn’t say my life is incomplete,

but some evening I could certainly enjoy

two hours with Cary Grant as my own toy.

I guess, though, we were destined not to meet.

My husband has a crush on Myrna Loy,

which makes some evenings harder to enjoy.

Mary Jo Salter, "Video Blues" from A Kiss in Space. Copyright © 1999 by Mary Jo Salter. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: A Kiss in Space (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

Biography

Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her . . .

Continue reading this biography