A Poem About Nothing

ELAINE: [reading an invitation] India? Yeah, right. [sarcastic] I’m goin’ to India. . .
—final line of Seinfeld episode 164, “The Betrayal”

But you did, Elaine. You boarded that plane out of sheer spite
for the braless bride and then ended up (yeah, right)
her Maid of Honor. So you’d slept with her
Peter/Pinter some other year.
Who cares? You felt a prick
to be her pick,
that twinge
the hinge
on which time turns
and flows away from urns,
caskets, and headstones. Reversal
of flow, a new life, now seemed possible.
It seemed. But time only flows one way, I’m afraid.
Credits are still etched at the end. The body’s still betrayed.

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and Of Air and Earth (Unicorn Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.