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The Third Poem
1 A month after I quit grad school, I got a birth control patch.
Two days later, I met my ex-boyfriend
1.1 An alphabet emerges
1.11 Aggressions, chicken bones, young boys with long index fingers
1.12 I often wonder how much I should withhold in my
writing. Or should I confess
1.13 In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes states, “where there
is a wound, there is a subject.”
1.14 I told myself, being a student of semiotics, that he was a
site of continuance
1.15 Of course I ignored the fact that he was married
1.16 That woman, the one over there,
who’s eating a Chinese egg tart with both hands
1.17 I was taught to have no sympathy for metaphor in poetry
1.18 Turtle soup, Calabrian olives, Hippodrome
1.19 He was a mouth breather, yes; but it was gargantuan
2 I am always ready to pick up codes
2.1 Punched holes in a piece of paper, Courbet
in search of pomegranates
2.11 That weekend we went to his mother’s house in Palm Desert,
I let him ass-fuck me out in the pool house.
2.12 Or what I meant to say, I always try to surround myself
with as much irony as possible
2.13 Not all husbands have read Moby Dick
2.14 You don’t need to take your clothes off
to find the spot where lust takes root
2.15 When he texted me to say that his wife had filed, I was
at the hardware store buying turpentine and hand soap
2.16 Turn the fax machine off, I screamed inside his mouth
2.17 Since childhood I have suffered from somatic omissions
2.18 Dark blue taffeta, cold liquid warmed between a woman’s legs
2.19 Maybe the trouble was, for the 18 months we
were together, I let him convince me
that I was the punctum
2.20 A man who stutters, later Wittgenstein,
the way a woman becomes her own cunt
2.21 Last night I dreamt that I saw David Reiff at a bar in Westchester.
He was drinking a vodka gimlet. There was a ukulele in his lap.
His hands coiled around it like a snake.
2.22 When I went over to say hello, he pretended to know my sex,
and photographed it.
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Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring 2023, Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, Gigantic Sequins, New York Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, and Conduit. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net.
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Gustave Courbet , Still Life with Apples and Pomegranates, 1871. Oil on Canvas, National Gallery, London
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Author: Terence Winch
