When she was a girl she hated everything
except girls, except her schoolmate, Sarah.
nothing good can come from kissing
something like a boy, so even Lola with feet
like a boy’s, she hated too. Sarah tied yarn
the color of toasted almonds in her hair
and worn holey knee highs that stopped
just under her thighs. Her thighs so pale
they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard
to their brightness, so delicious, like a sugared pear.
In college the touching began, first hands, then lips,
then Joan was her first lover. They told jokes
about the girls in their hall, smoked joints
in the closet often after hours of sex on Joan’s bed.
She never wiped her mouth after it grazed over Joan’s
body, just above her knees, but cried for days when her lover
took a boyfriend, and stopped coming to her dorm.
next semester she met Joan in the courtyard
next to the main gate. Joan was two months pregnant
and wanted to have sex with her one more time.
She slapped Joan in the face and said, Yes…please,
one more time.
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3 comments:
I have seen this one before in another draft I think. I love it's brazen ease.
and the feel of Nonchalant extreme Sexual and emotional tension for the speaker. surface level logic is intact. I might recommend for another draft more sensory details surrounding the place of the affair and the particularly the breakdown.
When the lover is lost what does the speaker smell feel and taste as she cries for her?
of course, when a person is at that emotional peak they have heightened sensitivity to their senses, salt in the mouth, buzzing in the ears, sensitivity to light. That is one reason actors try to remember those sensory images in every detail when recreating emotional recall.
I am wondering what might happen if some tenderness mixed in with your shock, not to say sentimental. Yet, you are so good, I bet you could pull off some sentiment in this draft.
If your speaker is in the bathroom for example when she cries for her lover, what all is going on in that open ringing super light blasting sink filled environment.
What if the speaker threw a fit in there smashing makeup mirrors and perfume bottles, hair rollers and eye liner, vowing never to go near things feminine again, and then after tried to reclaim lost items. What if the speaker were just a little pitiful for a moment? Would that be possible in another draft?
I love the speaker's tone in this draft. Obviously, this is a poem which deals with some very heavy emotions, but the speaker carries an almost freakishly nonemotional tone (and I mean that in the most positive manner because I feel that this tone is what make the poem innovative)…hearing this speaker talk about her relationship is almost like listening to a murderer nonchalantly recant the night of his/her killing…by not allowing an overabundance of emotion in the speaker's tone, you have somehow made the poem feel more emotional.
Are there, however, moments where experimenting with diction could benefit the poem? For example, could meaning and tone be experimented with by changing "holey knee highs" to "Holy knee highs"? Or, what if "Her thighs so pale they yelled for eyes to drift from blackboard" were changed to something like "Her thighs, pale sirens beckoning eyes to drift from the blackboard"?
Also, are there places where the poem could experiment with expectation? For instance, in stanza 5, is the bed a "too expected" place to have sex? What happens if this location were changed? What if this sex were to occur on Joan's roommate's bed; or on the bed of Joan's fake boyfriend who is a cover for her sexuality (maybe even it's this guy who gets her pregnant at the end)? Could it help to incorporate specifics into this scene? What song is playing on the radio? What movie is playing on the t.v? Obviously I am just toying around with ideas here, but asking these questions always seems to help me expand on my own thoughts. This is a fun read; I hope we get a chance to see where you take things.
Trista,
Again, I am always amazed by how well you deal with the shock factor in your writing, what Jeff referred to as the poem's "brazen ease." Equally impressive, is the concise, flat, straight-forward language and tone you employ. As Dr. Davidson has said many times, the most emotionally charged circumstances usually call for the coolest language, and I think that this draft is an excellent example of this rule. Adding more charged, poetic, or emotional language would veer on the side of sensationalism, something from which I think your draft does well at staying away. In a draft that is so intense in its distance from emotion, however, the one point in which emotion is shown, and quite explosively shown (when "she" slaps Joan), stands out. In standing out, it tends to elicit some questions: Why does "she" slap Joan? Is it because she's still hurt? She's angry? If so, why does she say yes? If so, why does she follow her yes with a please? What is the significance of "one more time?" Is it just one more time with Joan, or one more time period? How does the fact that the relationship ends badly dialogue against her assumptions that "nothing good could come from kissing something like a boy?" Why does Joan want to have sex with her again? In short, in the poem's current minimalistic emotional register, there is a lot of room for questions about the nature of not only her relationship with Joan, but also the "she" herself? (I do find it interesting the "she" is never named, but Sarah and Joan, the two interests, are named several times.) I want to know more about "she." Is there a reason she is never named? The poem is episodic, we only see the "she" character when she has a love interest. Is this because she can only define herself in relation to the love? Is it because, in spite of her own understanding of herself, society only understands her in terms of her sexual orientation?
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