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You are here: Home / Poetry / Categories of Ex-Lovers, Each with the Same Weight
Categories of Ex-Lovers, Each with the Same Weight

Poetry

Categories of Ex-Lovers, Each with the Same Weight

Those embalmed 
                                      and those with one leg
Those who go away to work every morning
The ones who have children with other women
Men who write their dreams down
Tailors, male and female alike
Those with over-large ears
Heroes except for Homeric
                                                Some who flew 
Women who smell like wet leather
Adolescents, male and female alike
The ones who have never been photographed
Men who refuse to ride horses
Sailors (or Merchantmen)
Sirens and those who refuse to listen
Men who read Borges out loud
Those whose bodies my nemesis has touched
Those, who, from forty feet, resemble Albert Camus
Those who tremble as if mad
Men who will never marry
Men someone’s married at least twice
Men who have passed from one category and into another
Old Testament scholars and snake handlers
Men who sing falsetto
Men whose handwriting resembles that of their mother’s
Those who grow their own herbs and know magic
Those who still belong to other women
Those women’s lovers 
Those who travel to Troy and never come back


Sarah Wetzel is the author of the poetry collection All Our Davids, released from Terrapin Books in 2019. She is also the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2010. When not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a MBA from Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, she completed a MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College in January 2009. You can see some more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com

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