Comedy of Remarriage
She sticks out her leg to trigger their fall.
(Felix culpa!) He, heir to a mug of beer—no, ale—
believes in the magical thinking of passive voice:
that the apple, the cards, the woman contains the vice,
while he hovers safely above the flesh of grammar.
(She speaks in paragraphs; he can only stammer
about jungles, his father, the innocence of his snake.)
Oh, she knows his type. The foot will slip. A mistake
can’t make itself (but she can help). Then he’ll begin
again, outfitted with the knowledge of his sin
and shame at having hoarded what was his to give:
a break, a fuck, a second chance. Himself. A rib.
And as the searchlight of a projector is beamed
out of itself, onto the satin slip of the screen,
so she’ll split like an atom, cleave like a cell,
creating other women from the one that fell.
-- Erin O’Luanaigh
Erin O’Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, The Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 Poems, Nimrod, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Utah. Her debut collection of poems, Avail, is forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in January 2026.
"Comedy of Remarriage" appears in the Summer 2025 issue of Nimrod, edited by Boris Dralyuk.
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