Featured Poem

Poems here will vary. I’m going to start with persona poems. In a persona poem, the narrator—the I of the poem—becomes someone else. I’ll start with a personal favorite, in which I tried to enter the consciousness of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.

Hadley Remembers

All things truly wicked start from an innocence
Ernest Hemingway,  A Moveable Feast

I knew what they were doing. In the dark
on the landing below. Through the closed door,
the noises they made. Ernest behaved

like a pig when he got excited. The muscles
took over and Ernest gone away and just his pelvis
butting at me and his breathing gone ragged

and those sounds coming out of him. Before,
when it felt smooth and lovely, he didn’t want me
to kiss back and once he got going it was too

late and the other times I didn’t know what
to think—he wanted me to do things and don’t
tell me I’m a prude. I could’ve done what he whispered.

But daylight was coming. His bluster blocked
me at every move. Can you say to the mirror
what you want when dark comes? His eyes

would not look there. He’d draw the shades
some afternoons and put my book aside, he’d put
his breath against my ear—little boy

who has spied on the grown-ups and now
he’s alone with a girl and the room is thick
with shadow and he wants  to do things

with her but he’s got it turned around—he wants
to be the one on the bottom and why not.
Otherwise Ernest never let him out.

The little boy, I mean. When he couldn’t get me
to do what he whispered, he looked around
and there was Pauline. She’d bobbed her hair.

Her eyes said dare me—I saw the hope they fired
in him. If she could play the boy tossing drinks back
with the lot of us, she’d play the man with him

when the lights went out. His eyes glittered
like shock. I wonder if he let himself
remember that time on the landing

with her hissing what she’d do
to him. Or what might have happened
if I’d opened the door and let the light shine

down onto their coupling. I don’t suppose
it matters. I could hear what they were doing.
I could hear ruin in the sounds they were making.

Published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Number 33, Fall/Winter 2009