SPORK PRESS
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Diane Seuss


[For me it’s going be to something simple, like Kylie Jenner dressing daughter]

For me it’s going be to something simple, like Kylie Jenner dressing daughter

Stormi as Kylie Jenner for Halloween. Or hearing some woman described

as having had a bubbly personality, as if that should have staved off plague.

I’d move to Iceland, but Iceland won’t have me. Anywhere really with emptiness

and socialized medicine. All I ask for is a hut with a moss roof but how many

sufferers on this planet have a whole hut to themselves with a moss roof.

There are some hard things coming up. You know what they are. We all face them,

though if you’re rich it’s a little easier I hear, independent living, assisted living,

memory care, skilled nursing muffling the path to the crematory. Damon, raised

in Flint, his co-op job was working for a cemetery, he was the guy who waved

a big magnet over the ashes to pull out the metal, told me what ends up in the urn

is a conglomeration of you and everybody ever born. It’s like an airplane

with no first class. That democracy of death thing. From Damon I learned

a lot but not what happens to a body without the money to be burned.

[Literature is dangerous business, the entrapment of form in poetry, plot]

Literature is dangerous business, the entrapment of form in poetry, plot

in fiction, can be claustrophobic to a person like me, and no trellised exit gate,

one can find themselves not just lost but impaled on the tangible details

of someone else’s world—blue paint drying on the pickets, meaty smell of hot

shrubbery—facsimiles, but also by the feelings of the characters, stratified,

as if by some eons-spanning organic process, grief, desperation, self-deception,

scattered sparingly with some gorgeous momentary wish fulfillment, two

characters, one secretive and impacted, one spontaneous, who meet at night

on a serpentine bridge, wordless brushing of fingertips over wrist, lips over jaw,

then part, headed for university or war, or their romance blossoms for a time

but goes flat, wrecked by capitalism, sex roles, time, you see, for weeks on end

I’m stuck in this prison made of paper and ink, this grinding ménage à trois,

unable to eat, rereading those few sentences written by someone wracked

with syphilis that emit the peppery musk of the blooms of white Hesperis.


Diane Seuss’ most recent collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. frank: sonnets is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2021. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.