my own private gurlesque

"You can do anything you want to with the constellations, you know."
--Leslie Marmon Silko, AWP reading 4/8/10


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Some of my girls this year include Liz Waldner's indelible Persephone from her new book Trust:

Persephone Tells About Some Goings Down

I took the subway downtown today.
My first time. I went down
not sure where to look, how to do.
(I look, he's looking.)
Mother with daughter, talking.
Change of station.
Mother with daughter laughing, walking.

I went to hear poets: kissing of cheeks.
Waving of books and fingers.
I didn't know a soul.
Paunchy bald men said
"I should apologize for this next poem, I'm
old-fashioned in my view of women," said
"Slut, oops, I should apologize, I

should say differently sexually abled, I
should say evil is done by the ethically challenged, I"
Ha-ha.
Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be included.
I want.
I look hopefully at faces
but everyone ha-ha's on cue.

My mother used to squeeze my sister's pimples
at the dinner table. Nobody screamed
out loud: we were supposed to enjoy
sausage, fried potatoes and each other.
Shame menu.
How doll parts on the sidewalk make me feel
sick, ha-ha.

When Alan Becker rang the doorbell and deposited me
on the New Year's Eve doorstep when I was sixteen
missing a shoe and a contact lens
sour puke and brittle leaves my raiment of glory
I couldn't stand up for my father to hit me.
My mother stood me up.
It wasn't anybody's first time, uh.

I don't know anybody in this city.
I don't know if I know how to know.
I just moved here. A room is home.
When they have nowhere else to go
roots--as in this narrow vase--go up.
(I wish my hair (ha-ha) were grass)
I hope they reach some stone.


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Someone in the audience at the Gurlesque reading at the AWP last week asked about our male influences, since they'd heard so much (not a word from a one of us) about our female ones. I couldn't believe the question was being asked (a bit "punishing" as one of my "fellow" panelists put it later) and I was simply flummoxed as we started to answer it, all in a row. If I recall, Catherine Wagner said Philip Sidney, I said Bob Dylan, and Dorothea Lasky said Prince. I don't recall the others. Bc flummoxed, you see.


I had considered mentioning both Aphra Behn and Charles Bukowski, in the context of my own private gurlesque, before I'd left for Denver.


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Anyway, I'm enjoying my Possibility tote, haggled for at the Poets House booth.


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