Marybeth Rua-Larsen

After My Yearly Reading of A Christmas Carol

From a fragment of an underdone
potato—and something more—my stomach roils.
I’ve learned to forfeit food, stay empty, outrun
the queasiness as humbug-me recoils
from sit-down meals and diatribes. My pills
don’t help, and gruel, the old school fix for all
that ails us, won’t cure this: their sharpened quills
and rude retorts will climax in a brawl.
And no one notices my barren plate,
the crumbs that fail to linger on my lips,
the wine untouched, despite the festive date,
the missing—their too-loud talk and marriage tips. 
Two generations gone and now mine wanes.
The losses multiply like Marley’s chains.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, and Crannóg, among others. She won the Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland. Her chapbook “Nothing In-Between” is available from Barefoot Muse Press.