I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married

 

I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married
By Aaron Smith
 
to a man who’s dating a man who’s                                                        
married to a woman. The husband
 
of the man I’m dating knows he’s
dating me and my boyfriend knows his
 
husband is dating the man who’s
married to the woman who does not
 
know her husband is gay. The guy
she’s married to—the boyfriend
 
of my boyfriend’s husband—just told
his mom he’s gay and she’s happy
 
because she never liked his wife
which is kind of funny but mostly
 
sad and I feel sad that her husband
who’s dating a man is also a man
 
with a mother who has never liked her.
I tell my boyfriend to tell his husband
 
to tell his boyfriend that he needs
to tell his wife sooner rather than later
 
and I know he knows that but still it needs
to be said. My boyfriend said his husband
 
said his boyfriend plans to tell his wife
Memorial Day weekend when his grown
 
kids are home from college and everyone,
I imagine, is eating potato salad by the pool.
 
She works at a flower shop two towns
over. I want to go there when she’s not
 
there and buy her flowers, leave a note
with her coworker at the counter:
 
              You deserve happiness, Natalie.
              You deserve love.
 
              Love,
 
              Your husband’s boyfriend’s
              husband’s boyfriend.
 
 
About the Poem
 
Aaron Smith’s poem “I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married” is a witty, layered, and poignant exploration of queer relationships, secrecy, and the tangled webs of love and obligation. At first glance, it reads like a piece of small-town gossip, the kind of convoluted story that grows more confusing the more one tries to explain it. Smith himself admits he “wanted this poem to seem like gossip and to sound convoluted in the way these scenarios sound when we try to convey them.” And indeed, the poem succeeds—its sentences loop and overlap, names vanish into pronouns, and each relationship branches into another until the reader feels caught in the same dizzying spiral as the speaker.
 
The poem begins plainly enough: the speaker is dating a man who is married to a woman. But very quickly, the cast expands—his boyfriend has a husband, that husband has a boyfriend, that boyfriend is still married to a woman, and on it goes. Each turn introduces another complication, another layer of secrecy or disclosure. The humor lies in the almost absurd wordplay of “my boyfriend’s husband’s boyfriend’s wife,” a construction that captures both the awkwardness of explaining queer love in heteronormative contexts and the entangled reality of lives lived in partial closets.
 
But beneath the comic tangle is sadness. At the heart of this web is Natalie—the unsuspecting wife, working in a flower shop two towns over. Her husband is living a life she doesn’t fully know, and the speaker’s compassion for her emerges in the imagined gesture of leaving her a note:

You deserve happiness, Natalie.
You deserve love.

It is the poem’s emotional crux. For all the confusion and gossip, Smith doesn’t let us forget the human cost of secrecy, the pain of those excluded from the truth, and the longing for everyone involved to find honesty and love.
 
The ending drives this home. The planned revelation is postponed until a convenient holiday weekend, when the family gathers “eating potato salad by the pool.” The image is almost comically suburban, yet it underscores how deeply closeted lives are woven into everyday rituals. Queerness is here, already part of the family table, even if it hasn’t been named aloud.
 
Smith’s poem is, in its way, deeply queer—not only in subject matter but in form. It resists straight lines, tidy categories, or simple relationships. It embraces convolution, contradiction, and the messy truth that love doesn’t always fit the scripts we’re handed. It is funny, yes, but also sad, compassionate, and achingly real.
 
For LGBTQ+ readers, the poem may feel familiar: the half-truths, the awkward explanations, the struggle to claim love openly without hurting others along the way. And for straight readers, it may pull back the curtain on just how complex closeted relationships can be—not only for the queer person hiding but for everyone around them.
 
Smith reminds us that at the end of all this gossip, the heart of the matter is love—love withheld, love shared, love denied, love deserved. And that is a truth worth repeating, even if it takes a whole poem of tangled pronouns to get there.
 
 
About the Poet
 
Aaron Smith is the author of several poetry collections, including Blue on Blue Ground (2005), Appetite (2012), and The Book of Daniel (2019). His work often explores themes of queer identity, desire, humor, and vulnerability, blending candor with a sharp, conversational style. Smith has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and his poems have been widely published in literary journals. Known for his mix of wit and emotional honesty, Smith often examines the complications of gay life in America—balancing comedy, longing, and sharp social observation.

Those Everlasting Blues

I’ve never been much of a fan of modernist poetry. Too often, it feels esoteric—odd for the sake of odd. When I used to teach American Literature, I would show my students two classic examples from Ezra Pound:

L’Art, 1910
by Ezra Pound

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

A splash of color, yes, but more like a cryptic painter’s note than a poem—striking yet emotionally opaque.

And then his most famous imagist fragment:

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Haunting, yes, but abstract and slippery, more an intellectual exercise than a window into human feeling.

Sixteen words about a wheelbarrow, fourteen words about a metro station—striking, but also elusive.

So when The American Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day recently featured Alfred Kreymborg’s “Those Everlasting Blues,” I expected something similar—another cryptic fragment of modernism. Instead, I was taken aback. This poem spoke to me in a way I didn’t anticipate. Beneath its simple diction and repetition, I heard the cry of a heart broken by longing. And in that ache, I recognized something deeply personal.

Since beginning this blog, I’ve been blessed with many wonderful friendships, like my cherished bond with Susan. But there have also been two men who, in different ways, claimed my heart. One lived far away and struggled with a debilitating illness; when he passed, I mourned but had known it was inevitable. The other’s loss, though, nearly destroyed me. He was a fragile young man who had begun to rebuild his life, and though he loved someone else, he also loved me—and I him. We spoke every day, ending each night with “I love you.” Then a tragic car accident cut his life short, and with it, a piece of my own heart.

Reading Kreymborg’s poem, I felt all of that loss return—the “everlasting blues” of loving someone you cannot keep. It reminded me that poetry’s power isn’t in being clever or obscure, but in giving voice to the things we ourselves can barely name.

Those Everlasting Blues
By Alfred Kreymborg

There ain’t gonna be
any more
mad parties
between
you and me
and it ain’t
gonna be
because I
love you less
but love you more.
And there ain’t
gonna be
any more
sad parties
between us two
because I’m
gonna forget
what I want
till I see
what I want
is you.
And I ain’t
gonna find
what you are
till I find
what it is
that you want
of me
and how
am I
gonna see
what it is
till all
of myself
loves you.
And I don’t
really love
you though I
love you more
than the world
till I learn
to swallow
whatever
you’d like
me to do.
And I ain’t
gonna down
whatever
that little
may be
till I love
me less and
love you more
and love you
for yourself
alone.
If there ain’t
gonna be
any loving
just you
alone
then it’s up
to me to
be taking
myself and
moving myself
off home.
And I’ll
be dragging
what’s left of me
to my lonely
room in the blue
and never
come back
and never
crawl back
till I’m through
just hugging
me.
And I ain’t
no I ain’t
gonna stop
doing that as
I ought to do
till I’m ab-
solutely and
positively
in love and
in love with
you.
And when I’ve
done that and
done only that
and done all of that
for you
you’ll hear me
on the doorstep
ringing at the
doorbell
for one more
party for two.
With nothing
mad in it
nothing sad
in it but
a long glad
lifelong spree
with me myself
loving you yourself
and you
loving me
for me.

When reading Alfred Kreymborg’s “Those Everlasting Blues” today, it’s easy to feel the poem pulsing with queer longing. The speaker aches for someone elusive, desired but never quite possessed. The repetition of “blues” and the sense of yearning that never resolves can strike a modern queer reader as deeply familiar: the pain of unspoken desire, of wanting someone who cannot—or will not—be fully yours.

Even though the poem is voiced as a woman’s lament for a man, nothing in the language itself insists on a heterosexual relationship. In fact, if we strip away the assumed gendering, the poem reads seamlessly as one man mourning his infatuation with another. Kreymborg’s plain, conversational diction keeps the focus on raw feeling rather than social convention, which makes the poem ripe for queer reinterpretation.

This is the power of queer reading: taking texts from the past and listening for the silences, the undercurrents, and the ways desire breaks through the boundaries of its time. For many queer readers today, Kreymborg’s “blues” could be the blues of any marginalized love—aching, unending, and yet profoundly human.

So does this mean Kreymborg himself was gay? Not necessarily. Biographically, there is no evidence he engaged in same-sex relationships. But “Those Everlasting Blues” belongs to his 1916 collection Manhattan Men, where he frequently wrote in other voices—shifting genders, adopting dramatic personae, and speaking through masks.

This “gender ventriloquism” was part of the larger modernist toolbox. Early twentieth-century poets often experimented with persona and dramatic monologue, inspired by classical models and energized by the free verse movement. Ezra Pound spoke through medieval troubadours, H.D. adopted mythic figures like Eurydice and Helen, and T.S. Eliot gave voice to Prufrock and Tiresias. For Kreymborg, writing in a woman’s voice allowed him to explore emotional registers that might have been difficult to express directly.

While his original intent may not have been queer, his willingness to blur identity in poetry—speaking as “the other”—is what allows queer readers to hear themselves in his work. The fluidity of voice makes his poetry feel like a space where hidden or forbidden desires could be expressed indirectly.

Whether or not Alfred Kreymborg personally shared the “everlasting blues” of same-sex longing, his poem gives us a vessel to pour that experience into. That is the beauty of queer reading: recognizing how art transcends the limits of biography and becomes a space where new meanings—our meanings—can flourish.


About the Poet

Alfred Kreymborg (1883–1966) was an American poet, playwright, editor, and anthologist who played a key role in the rise of literary modernism in New York. A central figure in Greenwich Village’s bohemian scene, he was the founding editor of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1915–1919), which introduced American audiences to avant-garde voices like Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Mina Loy.

Kreymborg’s career was eclectic—he wrote poetry, drama, fiction, and memoirs, and even performed on mandolin in experimental productions. His work was often overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries, but he was a connector and promoter of new voices at a time when American poetry was breaking free from strict formal traditions.

Importantly, Kreymborg moved in circles that included many queer and queer-adjacent writers: Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, and others who challenged conventional ideas of gender, sexuality, and identity in literature. While there is no evidence that Kreymborg himself identified as gay, his friendships and collaborations with these writers placed him in a cultural moment where queer creativity thrived beneath the surface.

Dog Days Done

Today’s poem arrives right on cue at the close of the Dog Days of Summer. As of yesterday, August 11, those long, sultry days ended; today, August 12, begins the slow march toward autumn. Salena Godden’s “Dog Days Done” captures this turning point with sensual, lyrical detail—personifying summer’s departure and autumn’s arrival in a way that feels both personal and universal. Godden, a British poet and novelist of Jamaican-Irish heritage, writes from a place of inclusivity and celebration, embracing her own bisexual identity and the diverse experiences that shape her work. In this piece, she reminds us that every ending is also a beginning.

Dog Days Done

By Salena Godden

 

Summer lifts her skirt

revealing a glimmer of

 

amber, light and yellow.

Summer takes her time

 

to pack her belongings,

her weary butterflies

 

and thirsty bees.

And somewhere

 

in a distant field

August writes

 

goodbye letters

in gold on hay

 

and corn and

chestnut and you.

 

The morning after

the first thunderstorm

 

you’ll open the window

and smell it changed,

 

wafts of smoke,

and rain and past.

 

This ending

is a beginning.

 

Make hay

and make love,

 

gather bilberries

and blackberries.

 

Dog days done,

Sirius is south,

 

the last burst of roses,

apples and cider,

 

the Lughnasadh feast,

the tomato harvest,

 

the fruits so red and ripe

in September’s hands,

 

summer feeding

autumn’s mouth.

 

 

About the Poem

“Dog Days Done” is a rich meditation on the seasonal turning point between the sultry heat of late summer and the first breath of autumn—precisely the transition we enter today. Godden personifies summer as a graceful, almost theatrical figure—“Summer lifts her skirt / revealing a glimmer of amber”—infusing the natural shift with sensuality and warmth.

Throughout, the imagery pulses with the fatigue and richness of August: “weary butterflies” and “thirsty bees” suggest both the end of a long labor and the sweetness that remains. The image of August writing goodbye letters in gold merges the agricultural—hay, corn, chestnut—with the personal—“and you”—inviting the reader into the intimacy of the season’s farewell.

The poem pivots on the moment after the first thunderstorm, when you “smell it changed,” a sensory shift signaling not loss, but renewal: “This ending / is a beginning.” Godden’s call to “Make hay / and make love” bridges work and pleasure, grounding the cyclical rhythm of the seasons in human touch and connection.

Her reference to the Lughnasadh feast places the poem firmly within a deep cultural and historical tradition. Lughnasadh, a Celtic festival named for the god Lugh, marks the beginning of the harvest season, traditionally celebrated on August 1 with games, markets, feasting, and offerings of the first fruits. It honors both the labor of the growing season and the gratitude for its bounty. By invoking it here, Godden aligns the personal and the cosmic—her imagery becomes not just about the turning of the weather, but about humanity’s timeless connection to the land and the cycles that sustain us.

Her closing lines—“summer feeding / autumn’s mouth”—collapse the boundaries between past and future, underscoring how every ending carries the seeds of what follows. There is also, in the openness of her imagery, a quiet inclusivity: love, labor, and renewal belong to everyone, a reflection of Godden’s own embrace of diverse identities and experiences.

 

About the Poet

Salena Godden is a British poet, author, broadcaster, and performance artist of Jamaican-Irish heritage, widely regarded as one of the most dynamic voices in contemporary UK literature. Her work spans poetry, memoir, essays, and fiction, with collections such as Under the Pier (2011), Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994–2014 (2014), Pessimism Is for Lightweights – 13 Pieces of Courage and Resistance (2018), and With Love, Grief and Fury (2024). Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death (2021), won multiple awards and was shortlisted for others, cementing her place as a distinctive and daring storyteller.

Openly bisexual, Godden’s creative life has often been shaped by queer spaces and sensibilities. She has spoken of writing in “glorious gay bars” and embraces a worldview informed by inclusivity, fluid identity, and celebration of difference. These values infuse her work with a generosity of spirit and a refusal to confine human experience to narrow definitions.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Godden is also an acclaimed performer, known for her live readings that blend lyricism, humor, and political consciousness. Her poetry often carries both the intimacy of lived experience and the resonance of myth, connecting personal moments to universal cycles—much like the seasonal turn captured in “Dog Days Done.”

The Final Words of Puck – A Shakespearean Farewell

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Act 5, scene 1

By William Shakespeare

 

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

 

 

One of my favorite passages in all of Shakespeare comes at the very end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spoken by the mischievous sprite Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. In this closing soliloquy, Puck breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, offering a whimsical apology and a gentle reminder that all the magical chaos of the play was nothing more than a dream:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended—

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

These lines invite the audience to consider the events of the play as a kind of dream state, a fantastical interlude where love and identity swirl in a moonlit wood, governed by fairies and folly. Puck—Shakespeare’s impish trickster—has spent the play both delighting in and accidentally disturbing the lives of mortals. Here, he offers a lighthearted reparation: if any of the night’s enchantments have unsettled the audience, they can simply imagine it all as a dream, and let go of any offense.

 

As a character, Puck embodies the spirit of mischief and transformation. He is Oberon’s jester and servant, the orchestrator of magical mishaps, and a symbol of the play’s themes of illusion, play, and unpredictability. Yet in this final moment, he becomes almost like a stage manager or storyteller, drawing the curtain on the night’s performance. The poem’s gentle rhymes and soft cadence give it a lullaby quality, reinforcing the idea that what we’ve witnessed was a fleeting vision.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends. 

With this closing couplet, Puck asks the audience for applause—literal hands—and pledges to make things right again, as if promising that art, like dreams, can enchant but also restore. As a poem, it stands beautifully on its own, a meditation on the power of storytelling to both dazzle and heal, to stir the heart and then gently release it back into the waking world.

 

About the Author

 

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and numerous poems, leaving behind a literary legacy that continues to influence storytelling, language, and performance. From comedies and tragedies to histories and romances, his work explores the full range of human experience with wit, beauty, and insight.