Aunt Rachel feels she is falling behind

In which Susan turns a corner.

Susan spends six weeks on antibiotics
and decides she's stopped drinking.
She starts watching videos
made by an eager young New Zealand man
and doing stretches in the morning.
Gleefully, she informs me that self-love
in a function of self-discipline. I
have always been the sober one,
but I have never gotten into 
sobriety like Susan is doing. 
She's invented a whole new god 
who loves her, her very own Higher Power.

Does anyone love Susan more than I do?
Now she has the two-minute rule,
the hell-yes or no rule. 
For the first time, Susan is saying hell yes 
to life. I could never convince her. 
I was afraid she'd drop off the earth. 
Now my exceptionally stable wife 
is sympathetic. If I can't 
grab her by the belt loops
and haul her back up, she suggests
I find my own inspirational young Kiwi.
It doesn't mean she's rejecting me. 

These poems are part of a developing suite of poems written in the voices of Aunt Rachel, her wife Susan, and their niece Lucy. In these poems, Aunt Rachel, a working class woman in her fifties, directly addresses both her wife Susan and the reader in a series of ardent monologues. She applies a personal theology to questions of file transfer, domesticity, the environment, football, organized religion, bar culture, urbanism, composting, the pandemic, and the future. Susan responds. Lucy says her piece. As it turns out, all three of these women have a great deal to say.

I’ve published Aunt Rachel poems in Poetry is Dead, in a chapbook you can buy here, and also by mail and video poem. (If you want to watch some Aunt Rachel live, you can do that here.)