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quiet as it’s kept
no one tells you about these boys : their quiet feminism
grows like wildflowers : in their mothers’ gardens : you
should take a field
trip : i’m telling you : they are
like
architechtural flourishes
unseen
all about town : baroquing
libraries : finishing museums with clean modern lines : no
one tells you not to look past neat
in search of
shine
or brawn : the masculinity that winks and whistles at you
like times
square or roars and kicks up dust like a pick-up
truck : the open
secret of such sexiness has its charms :
but the boys who open doors for men
and
women : who
catch you watching them adjust
their glasses and eye you
a smile : no one tells you what such subtle signs can mean
: i’m telling you that these boys
flowering
flourishing
and their quiet twinkling eyes can spark enough heat to warm
you through a massachusetts winter : pools of melt making
mud of your footprints : behind you
the ice freezing silently
over your private spring
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Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the latter was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem, among others. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
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