Tuesdays

By Kate Gale Kate Gale

Today is a Tuesday, one of many.

He has a girl he loves every Tuesday,

her day off. He burns

at the fine fire of her conscience,

tells her they’ll be married

someday. He has a wife,

Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing

who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday

at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies.

Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard

end up at Tuesday’s feet and

sprinkled through the sheets.

Of course they must make love,

since he sees her only once a week.

Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother.

He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive.

He tells this to Tuesday

and to Doreen.

Doreen tells him he is an ox

a brute master of the air and his rightful bed.

But Tuesday, who knows oxen

are slow moving, dim witted,

and castrated at birth,

follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer,

climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife,

leaves rose petals on his doorstep,

takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers

watches the city disappear in rain.

Thinks briefly of how tenderly

he rose in her fingers

while the remains of their breakfast,

eggs and potatoes

cooled on the wooden table

with the tattered tablecloth.

Kate Gale, “Tuesdays” from Fishers of Men. Copyright © 2000 by Kate Gale. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.

Source: Fishers of Men (Red Hen Press, 2000)

Biography

Kate Gale is the author of several poetry collections, including Mating Season (2004) and Fishers of Men (2000), as well as the novels Lake of Fire (2000) and Water Moccasins (1994). She is the founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press and editor of the Los Angeles Review.

Gale is the author of four librettos: Rio de Sangre with composer Don Davis which was performed in part at Disney Hall in 2005; Paradises Lost, . . .

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