Blackbird Archive
← v8n1, Spring 2009
Poetry · Volume 8, Number 1

spring's confessional poem

Diane Seuss

i’ve opened

my blouse to you and your heavy

head between my

and i’ve unlatched my

and spread my

here i’ve said here

and there’s that snowdrop you love to touch

(my hair like mink my skin unfurling like a wedding)

an array of sweetmeats for your pleasure

(pink ones and lilac-flavored ones)

and

teased out the spray of seeds

verbs my specialty

stroked and furrowed

until you think i’m one way

but i’m another way

kissed your belly kissed and kissed

(wild roses among the lilacs

eggs among the nests woven from chemotherapy hair)

desireillnesslove
Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is Writer-in-Residence at Kalamazoo College. She is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues, 1998). Her poems have been anthologized in Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (2005), Are You Experienced? Baby Boom Poets at Midlife (2003), and Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation (1999), all from the University of Iowa Press. Seuss’s work has recently appeared in The North American Review , Indiana Review , Cimarron Review , and The Georgia Review .