Olena Kalytiak Davis

Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb. I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank season, counting—I sleep and I sleep. I sleep, Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf as a leaf. Reader:Why don’t you turn pale?

having studied swarthmore charts and mirrors, fashion magazines, foucault, bloom, bad light, whereof—hereof—had not become clearer; what vision to present as first self-sight. self quit; put on boots and a see-through dress, some thought it was ironic "self-object- ification", said they were not impressed. some guessed that "honesty" was self's subject, were put off nonetheless, self-asked: to sleep with me? who would? self flat, self one inch deep, self-glimpsed not much in that giant mirror: innocence -credulity, self doth protest! hey! presumptuous interlocutor! pissed off, thwarted, played, and soon, undressed!

my god all the days we have lived thru saying not this one, not this, not now, not yet, this week doesn’t count, was lost, this month was shit, what a year, it sucked, it flew, that decade was for what? i raised my kids, they grew i lost two pasts–i am not made of them and they are through. we forget what we remember: each of the five the fevered few days we used to fall in love.

O my Love sent me a lusty list, Did not compare me to a summer's day Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes But catalogued in a pretty detailed And comprehensive way the way(s) In which he was better than me. "More capable of extra- and inter- Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi- Lingual! More practiced in so many matters More: physical, artistic, musical, Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social (In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!” And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e) And left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me.

“i” has not found, started, finished “i’s” morning poem, the poem “i” was writing about “i” having sex with the man “i” left her husband for the night before or maybe just this morning. a sex poem, so to speak, so to say, so as to lay... a foundation for... what???????? SEX i lost my sex /poem! how did it go? i know it was called SEX something about my bosky acres, my unshrubb’d down ‘bout all being tight and yare (bring in tiresias?) did you say soothe? tiresias, who lies fucking more? whoops. who likes fucking more ? (“bring in // the old thought //(allen grossman doing yeats) that life prepares us for//what never happens”) today (the color of )