This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is Andrea Werblin’s “Arguing in Public,” from Lullaby for One Fist (2001).

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Arguing in Public

Any plastic flower’s lame reach to heaven is any Dos Equis’
knowledge of terror,
so you go a few rounds of proving emphatically nothing,
grow up prickly and worn
before you’ve gotten a chance to rotten each other the long way.
Couples of this taquería,
I could use you being happier if you wouldn’t mind it,
because the heater emits only flowers
of heat, and the birds caught in the air ducts are shrieking
like his best afternoon
of locking me out and calling the police, & the police laughing.
May you never again call each other jerkass
in a car on a Saturday morning,
while your love and hate deprivatize.
May your foolhearted means
of courting what is over be over now. Structureless as you are,
try thanking your respective bellies
for being potlike, the winter’s weird fingers for a fury
more gracile than all your years alone.

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ANDREA WERBLIN has had poetry published in various print and online journals, including BOOG Reader, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts, The Massachusetts Review, and Smartish Pace. She has a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She currently works as a Creative Director in the Boston area.