The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Terri Brown-Davidson
The Woman Who Makes Things Up
"They're different," she said. "Unlike others you've taught." My boss wired with horn rims That made her look stern, like some grand Chattering elder Bearing witness for the tribe Though her teeth flashed white When she smiled. Her assistant— While my new boss intoned— Studied her lap as if some fascinating Rent in her skirt trapped her gaze And I was nowhere except newly hired, My poetic dreams defunct. I trembled at the opportunity to confront— To be forced to stroke— Another Student Body. How could I write poetry When, each morning, the students, Eyeing with snarl-toothed scorn Poor grades, Strolled yammering into my classroom, That stupid beige room harboring Dead poetry dreams And lint-soft illusions Dissipating before their faces? Pinch me, I'm dreaming, The first boy said, his face freckled bland And white As the virgin screen I stared at After class, still shivering from my mass encounter With students who proclaimed Wallace Stevens a freak.
But Jazz Girl dwells in me still, The alter ego whispering "To hell with all that comp" When images cluster mothsoftening On my cheek And winged phrases feather my skin And I remember who I am: that woman Who makes things up. Some nights I go home And grade papers, Dream about orangutans Wrapping me in hirsute, auburn arms That warm me before I sleep. In class We discuss "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" Until the poem crumbles And the images go limp As a fish pulled three weeks ago from the freezer. "That Emperor guy's a freak," the freckled boy
announces. And the class, dismissed, Darts away toward quotidian dreams.
On Seeing Heather McHugh Read
A poetic neophyte, Clumsy in tracking both vehicle and tenor, I watched a woman sit cross-legged On a bare, stark stage, Lit by a rush of fluorescence so floodlike It drowned then cleansed her. Her broad, pale face, The forehead molded and spotlit, swollen, Her rounded cheeks sunken into twinned shadowed triangles, Gazed forward as if into a black hole imploding. Examining us—her bittersweet, breathing darkness— She swiped sinewy hair strands behind both ears, Her raw, metal glass frames Touched with a refractive bronze. Her voice, then, wafted above me, A mystical monotone, A blunted-off version of the boys' down the block, Harrowingly dry, Snake rasps slicing through sudden melting butter, Her voice—mellifluous—slithering toward rapture. Oh, to be a poet like that, Tender, tart, rhapsodic, asp-witted And aphoristic, A Brit in New Englander's clothing, Deliciously understated, Succulently sullen, But with a bite.
After hearing her read, For hours I can't write a word.
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