The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 6/10/2008)

[RetroLounge]

First Date, and Still Very, Very Lonely

A pleasant, leather poison
is the trick to smelling
good to female saddles,

that is, saddles with a hole
and not a pommel. Remember
those? Gone the way

of Vestal virgins and tight,
white black holy hell and with it,
the lesbian Elysium of old.

I miss the idea of wives.
The loving circle.
But onward. Today

is a sacred day. A date day.
An exception to the usual
poor me, poor me!

I'm not poor and I'm not me.
I remember both
states as soon ago as last week.

But that's history.
This is different. At a party,
once, everyone was so careful

that only I cut my lip drinking
from the winterspring
a kind of cold, decorative trough

centerpiece we were all
drinking from. The idea is
you're like animals.

If you ask, about the cut, why me?
The answer is, of course me.
In what world ever possible not me?

I could admit that with open blood
running down my chin
like hyena butter or gasoline.

I was mortified, really lost.
After that I thought,
I have to meet someone.

Brenda Shaughnessy

**********************



Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.


**********************
:hi:

[lizziegrace]

1. ...

wow...

:hug:

[xchrom]

2. ...

I could admit that with open blood
running down my chin
like hyena butter or gasoline.

I was mortified, really lost.
After that I thought,
I have to meet someone.

[RetroLounge]

3. ...

hello!

:hi:

RL