September 3: A Better Poet, Marie Howe, "Practicing"

So, the poem below may make some of my readers feel uncomfortable.  That's okay.  Sometimes, that what poetry does.  It pushes you to re-understand the world.

I'm working on a new poem right now, and it always helps my process to read a poem that surprises me.  That's why I love Sharon Olds.  She writes about subjects that most people push into the back of the closet.  Marie Howe does the same thing in the poem below.  But it's only in looking at things head-on that we gain insight and understanding.  Sort of like listening to a Donald Trump campaign speech closely and realizing that he's a hate-mongering, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic idiot.

So, Marie Howe and Sharon Olds push me to be a better poet.

And Donald Trump pushes Saint Marty to look for teaching jobs in Vancouver.

Practicing

by:  Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.