Eleanor Writes She’s Reading Rimbaud

← v12n2, Fall 2013

even though I know better than to get nostalgic,

to those early years in Cortland, the smell of apples

like a sweet red fog all over town when the orchards

bloomed each fall. We’d work a day shift at Smith Corona,

lie in the dark fields at night. I can still hear the cars

rushing by on the highway, see the stars overhead,

on a pool cue brought him to my room early mornings,

flush with cash he’d taken off the dumb-bunny freshmen

at the college up the hill. I swear we even played

that scene, tossing bills over ourselves, high & naked,

in my narrow bed. I don’t want to think of our lies,

our petty thieving, how we stitched kangaroo pockets

into the linings of our coats. Or how for weeks we

lived on boosted steaks & candy. I don’t want to think

again of next-door L., how her toddler stared all day

out the window above the crummy bar where she danced,

while she & her junkie lover slept off their latest

derangement. All I ever gave that kid was a wave

memory youth desire

Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her poetry collection Muse from Southern Illinois University Press won the 2003 Levis Reading Prize and the 2003 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A two-time winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council (1997, 2000) she is also a recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Artist Fellowship (2003). Recent poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Provincetown Arts, and Maggid , and translations of several of her poems into Mandarin by Chinese poet Luye have recently appeared in the Chinese literary journals Poetry Forest and Chinese-Western Poetry. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001).