DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the mountains of northern New Mexico, USA.  His work has been widely published in journals throughout the US, UK, Europe and Israel.  His collection Tarantula Season and Other poems is available on Amazon, and a second collection, Flight Risk, is scheduled for release in 2025. Further work can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com

Gertrude to Her Chambermaid

Come fetch me out my bracelets, girl,
and find that garnet brooch he sent last week,
the heavy piece of twisted silver wire that joins
two rampant red-eyed dragons at my throat.
Be quick about it now, for this could really be
the night, the night he kneels before his queen
no longer just another ardent subject, merely,
but as eager, randy suitor.

(The randier the better, I might add,
since it’s been quite the while, dear girl,
since I have couched hot manhood here,
within this royal locket, Object of Desire.)

The old king’s energies were quickly spent
those long years gone, I fear,
when once the longed-for scion tumbled
puling into this wretched North of ours
to weave his tiny irksome discontentments
through the salty air out here at Elsinore.

And it’s that brooding man-child
that concerns me now, the issue of our youth,
who mopes along the crenelated parapets
and indistinctly mumbles to himself.
The child he was seemed always underfoot,
and I who hauled his rasping pediatric whine
around the place for years, his unrelenting
vice-grip fingers clutching at my skirt,
would just as soon be quit of that
beseeching look of his and play the girl again.

But how he stalks the corridors, that ghoulish
prince of ours! He really needs a woman’s touch,
I’d say, and not by God that bloodless wraith,
Polonius’ kid, herself as loopy as this brainsick
son of mine: but no, a nice plump Jewish girl perhaps,
who’s good at soups and good enough at sex
to pry apart the tiny digits of that mad prehensile
mind of his, relax its grip, and quietly unknit
this tiresome fixation that he’s got
on the timely disappearance of my ex.