Ol' School by Oak Morse

Paste a wife on me.
Spend the evening
engagement ring shopping.
Plan out a fancy proposal.
Wash my life in wedding white--
anything to put a wife with me.

My grandmother will marry me
to a toilet if she could.
Does everything have to be
bouquets and baby names?
Does everything have to be
cooking and cleaning conversations
with the wife she is casting?

I understand my grandmother
is super old school, but I’m more
than just a handsome man who looks
like husband material. Grandma,
you do not have to always throw
flower petals in my face or ask me
about long-ago lovers, they’re just as
dead to me as bridal veils.

When the right one comes, I promise
we will all be able to pop champagne
over it. Until then, you don’t have to
shove me in a house with a wife and kids
and call it happiness. Happiness is
loving life without having to love it
with someone.
​
To be frank, I’d rather be an old bald
bachelor writing poems about when
she comes than to be tied down
with the wrong one.

Oak Morse

is a poet and theater instructor born and raised in Georgia. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature as well as a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Awarded the 2017 Hambidge Residency, Oak’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Indianapolis Review, Star 82 Review, Menacing Hedge, Nonconformist Mag, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Oak has a B.A. in Journalism from Georgia State University and he currently lives in Houston, Texas where he teaches creative writing and performance and leads a youth poetry troop, The Phoenix Fire-Spitters.