Kim Roberts

GHAZAL

My girlfriend looks alluring in her madras shorts,

splayed out on the sheets in her madras shorts.

“I don’t believe in drawstrings,” my girlfriend says.

I assure her one exists in her madras shorts.

I admire her two-step in old brown slippers,

a-waggle from the hips in her madras shorts.

The city of Madras is now called Chennai.

The East India Company’s in her madras shorts.

Frat boys back from Caribbean resorts

Love the cheap, strong cotton of her madras shorts.

Before the pandemic, we were adults.

Now she’s in bed at 9 in her madras shorts,

in the bright plaid hues woven deft and light,

in what passes for pajamas, in her madras shorts.

All night her furnace generates terrific heat

from the pink pocket hidden in her madras shorts.

Kim Roberts is the author of Buried Stories: A Guide to Washington, DC-Area Cemeteries (Rivanna Books, 2025), and editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020, selected to represent DC by the East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program). She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and six books of poems, most recently Q&A for the End of the World, a collaboration with poet Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions, 2025), and Corona/Crown, a collaboration with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). She administers the Arts Club of Washington’s Pride Poets-in-Residence program and co-edits DC Pride Poem-a-Day each June with Jon Gann.