The State-Line Stripper — Blackbird Archive

← v4n1, Spring 2005

I got lost.

At a family picnic for the employees

of Martha White Self-Rising Flour.

Two lovers found me down by the Tennessee River,

a little fat girl

crying into the lichen on a stone's face,

and took me to the grandstand—

Embarrassing—

I got lost. And then I lost my fear.

Strangers and high places

and nightly publishing myself

naked except for a fireman's hat.

I danced and Jehovah's Witnesses

came unglued in the parking lot.

My creation was like the earth's.

In the beginning there was shame,

then the body after shame,

dangerous happiness—

If I could remember how I got here

I wouldn't be lost.

Yet my body recommends me.

All that I promised that I would not do, I did.

I got over my fear of darkness

when it seemed to me anything out there

would probably be better

than what shone here in the light.

body sexuality identity humor

Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books of poems, including four collections from Houghton Mifflin: Salvation Blues (2006), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, and a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Things That Happen Once (1996), finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Transparent Gestures (1989), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other awards include the Harper Lee Award, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new book, Village Prodigies , which combines techniques of poetry and fiction, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2017. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in New Orleans and Southern Illinois.