about the author: Ricky Rankin was living in Seattle and working with a theater group there back in the mid to late 80s when he was submitting work to the review. This poem is a great comeback to an unspoken question, "Does poetry have to be so serious?" -gcb

Just My Type

My boyfriend plants bachelor buttons on the first day of spring, fixes my car, rides a Harley-Davidson and is an excellent cook, specializing in Indian Convention Banquets and flatbush puddings; he's gotten me to work out at the gym where he composes sestinas on the parallel bars in his head, he's a genius you know, makes mechanical clocks out of tin foil and plastic baggies, ceramic toothbrushes and bone pillows, he walks for the whales and owns a chain of fast food macrobiotic restaurants with art deco decor he designed himself.

He speaks Urdu, Tagalog, Russian, Polish and French and he's published 3 novels and a book of art criticism in Swahihli as well as numerous essays on animal husbandry and international politics.

He's perfect. He's tall, dark, muscular, masculine, sensitive, liberal, liberated, stable, devoted, independent, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, likes children and small monkeys and going away parties, and, oh I don't know, just spending evenings alone camping out at the site of the dream house he's building all by himself. And he's not even vain! He walks, talks, rides the bus, jogs, sits, stands, reaches the top shelf, is generally handy to have around, and (can you believe it?) he's just my type.