Confessional Poem
I fucked your husband and I don’t feel
__bad enough for the bourgeoisie. My sexuality
roughly translating into teenage vampire,
__my blood a pop song programmed to some
_____dumb catastrophe.
I read your shaming
__poem and I was mad. Whorish
and occult-like, the bad, bad, clouds
__overlaying the bad, bad mythological storm
____the sad, sad, mythological storm of crushed cars,
yelling Thor, Thor, Thor, full of death and revenge.
__Implored dead herons in the great, marine
light of the balled up planet, the testicles
__of angels hanging down like sensitivity
or pathos or icicles saying, “Baby, we live
in a world too beautiful
____for our own work songs.”
Shame
___or just what everyone thinks you
__should be doing with your body. Accustomed
to violence, “Just let it all out,” my colleague said I cried
against a fake potted succulent, and the plant
___bent the plastic and money surface
__of manufactured intoxication, of affect.
_Then read how affect would be rung up,
charged, a rape made more real. I want
_____to rent your mom. There’s a point where
__tears become their down desert after all.
“Don’t you have a sense of humor?”
_____I guess not. I wasn’t meant
__to be moving in this current. S/he said
___being in your body was watery. The way fish
_fuck up too, swim the wrong direction, then die.
__The modern. Hyperventilation and watching
___something braided like ivy burn.
–Sandra Simonds
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Sandra Simonds is the author of four books of poetry: Steal It Back (forthcoming from Saturnalia Books, December 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Sandra’s fifth book, Further Problems with Pleasure, is the winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Akron Press.
