about the author

Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in DMQ Review, Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, Verse Wisconsin, and in the anthologies A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems and Bigger Than They Appear: An Anthology of Very Small Poems. Her chapbook, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), is available and her chapbooks, Ophelia Unraveling and The Ornithologist Poems, are available from dancing girl press. She was winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.


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Thank Heavens for Shakespeare 

Carol Berg



I am always in and out of love
with my husband. Tonight—out.

Out of love and instead, in a cranky mood:
That sweatshirt he’s wearing, and his hair!

Maybe Titania and Oberon were out of love and needed an excellent fight.
Of course, here I am in my own drab grey sweatshirt, no sleeping beauty

amid wood thyme and nodding oxlips.
Where is my night full of misguided agents—

to light my eyes on fire with a love gone wrong—some strange fellow
(who, shhhh, is actually my husband now in full hunk-mode) to call me
       angel.

And we find our way through a wood full of word play and misunder-
       standings
to a magical morning where the sun is tender and my husband is new and
       yet

the same to me again, and my own skin radiant, my hair long and shiny.
       Love undeniable.
Oh, Husband of the Ill-Fitting Sweatshirt! Let me pour you a glass of this
       most

mysterious wine I’ve found hidden in a dusty cupboard.
Let us go outside and wander in our familiar backyard, barefoot.

Let us recognize that even those luminous stars
must sometimes feel stuck in their very own heaven.





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