Tag Archives: collaborative poetry

Ann Pedone

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from: The Monogamist

Then I was at the embassy.
Then I was picking up
chunks of ice a truck had
dumped off by the side
of the freeway.

Then I was in my car
listening to the radio.
A guy going on about the
history of European
socialism and this very
specific way men had
of jacking off during
the long fifteenth century.

Hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me

I’ve run out of sugar to stop it.

 

When I was twelve or thirteen I lived for a
summer next to a cold creek. Back then that
was what was known as the politics of “long
distance women”, or forgetting to hold your
pocketbook close to your chest. Let’s get to
work! And all the husbands in line at
Safeway do their very best to remain unpainted,
although some are still slightly bruised. I still
remember that morning when I had the rare
luxury of moving the entire prehistory of my sex
life counter-clockwise. Smaller than usual atoms
are always the most fertile. And it calms me. Like
a brand new estrogen patch. Or pouring someone
else’s hot soup all the way down the drain.

 

Your cock looked a little dogwood the first time
you took it out. Had you left it inside another
language for too long? Or was it late to pick up
its prescription? Every hour more rescuers are
needed in the flood zone. More lines of cable
desperately have to be lain. What makes a line
in a poem? In a body? That so many migrant
boats are at the very bottom of the Mediterr
anean. Let me tell you what history teaches,
said mother Gertrude Stein. History teaches.

 

The Byzantine Empire is a sensation.
Like going in for a full bikini wax but
deciding instead to stop eating meat.
I know you had a pretty decent childhood.
And I admire you for that.
Which makes it even more strange that you
felt the need to write me a list of all your
sexual sticking points.

Since this morning I’ve taken a shower
three times execution style.
And now whenever someone says the
word “poem” I always hear “she really
wanted to do it but her prolapsed uterus kept getting in the way.”

 

What is rightly sucked.
What is left barren during all the long
summer months.
What happens to a man’s erection when you
tell him that Western Literature started
when a bunch of Greek guys tried to
fuck another man’s wife.

I stand or fall with the very thickness of this.

These pieces come from a project I’ve been working on called “The Monogamist.” In the work we follow a woman who’s doing something that I think we’ve all done-she’s trying to figure out the relationship she’s currently in-and in so doing, she thinks about language, the body, what it means to be a woman who is very loud about her own horniness-which my phone just auto-corrected to “hormones,” which, I suppose, makes sense since she is going through menopause.

This is what the project wants to be. What it refuses to be is yet another Madame Bovary story of a woman who suffers because of whom or how she loves. And it refuses to depict a woman’s body as solely a site of trauma, or of male desire. Instead, I wanted to blow these two things up and find a way to tell a different sort of story-while at the same time, always acknowledging and grappling with the fact that trauma and the male gaze are very real and ever-present.

Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) and Liz (forthcoming from Tofu Arts Press) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Texas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River and Tupelo Quarterly. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature, and has a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley. She is the founder and editor in chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.

Maureen Seaton & Denise Duhamel

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12 Lines about Gender (Florida-Style)

I looked to the sky, a UFO above me, or was it a gender
rolling over and over in that big sky like a female
orgasm, delirious with flashing lights? Intercoastal intersex
is so lovely with its salt water and its fresh: true Two-Spirit
brackishness. I mistook a manatee for an androgynous
goddess of rising sea and sinking city, gender-fluid
silver ripples along her back. I spied an omega male
kayaking quietly through musky mangroves, all genderqueer
with their gorgeous underwater roots, their agenda agender
and big love (the nursery of the world!). One transgender
spaceship (or was it a cloud?) was tired of cisgender
sand hogs and sea bullies and wrote across the sky: Bye, Gender!

12 Lines about Gender (the Cosmos)

I believe there is no one on the planet luckier than a bi-gender,
who, like a hipster trickster, lives above the fray, unidentifiable
in their lovely/lanky/stunning/staggering way beyond cisgenders
and their scripts. Monday I’m a femme, Tuesday, androgynous
as a moon pouring light in a cosmos that’s so gender-fluid
it holds Castor, Pollux (twin boys) and Venus (so female,
she’s star of both morning and evening, leading the sun, male,
and earthly Gillette to name a razor in her honor). Agender
ex-planet, Pluto, boasts 5 moons of mythical transgendered
radiance. Astronomists spy on Nix, its interstellar intersex
moonstruck self, as they fly by Pluto to confirm its two-spirit
orbit. The Hubble zooms in on each lovely sphere, genderqueer.

A former proud contributor to Posit Journal, Maureen Seaton has authored twenty-one poetry collections, both solo and collaborative — most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019). Her awards include the Lambda Literary Award, an NEA, and two Pushcarts. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many fine literary journals and anthologies. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy.” Seaton is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009); Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orhisis, 1997). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). With David Trinidad, they edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull, 2007).