Michael Loderstedt

Mr. Natural

You sneak into the house
after midnight, tripping
your balls off on Mr. Natural.
Mom’s up, watching Bogdonovich’s
The Last Picture Show on the tiny black & white
downstairs. His masterpiece no doubt, but
you don’t know that yet.

You take a seat, not because you want
to, your psyche feeling slender hands around
its throat. But somewhere between Cybil Shepard
falling off the diving board & Cloris Leachman falling
for the young football player, your mother
starts to talk about her old boyfriends,
prom dates and the times she
danced to Count Basie
at Birdland.

At that moment, she seems quite small
& frail and you want to hug her as she
starts to cry. You want to forget the violent
asshole asleep upstairs in her bed. You want
to forgive her and say it’s going to be okay, but
it isn’t, so you try not to watch her weeping.

The two of you alone in the light of the TV screen, 
in silence as Ellen Burstyn turns to daughter
Jacey, Just remember, beautiful, everything
gets old if you do it often enough.

Michael Loderstedt’s first book of poems Why We Fished published by Redhawk Publications in 2023 received a silver award from the UK Poetry Book Awards. Recent writings have been featured in Naugatuck River Review, Muleskinner Journal, the NC Literary Review, Bangalore Review, Poem for Cleveland & Musepaper. He was awarded a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio near the shore of Lake Erie with his wife Lori and son Ethan.