Please join us Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 7:00 pm, when poets Stella Corso and K. T. Landon will read for the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)
Stella Corso
Stella Corso lives in Brooklyn, New York and is the author of Tantrum, chosen by Douglas Kearney as winner of the 2016 Black Box Prize from Rescue Press. She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets’ Theater (CRVPT) and a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at UMass Amherst.
K. T. Landon
K. T. Landon is the author of Orange, Dreaming (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the 2013 winner of the Arts & Letters PRIME Poetry Prize, a finalize in Narrative‘s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. She serves as a Poetry Reader for Muzzle, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Millennium Writings, Passages North, and Ibbetson Street, among others. By day she works as a platform operations manager at a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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MY DESIRE / Stella Corso
my desire drives the car
that leads me to your house
that drops me at your door
bump on the road
we swerved to miss
a half-grinning thing
still moving maybe
and when your house moves
I move with it
and my car has a mind to
turn this thing around
I usually do
but today I cried
for a combination of you
and my desire
what was that lump
we go back to look
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TO MY HUSBAND, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME / K. T. Landon
Is the poem about death again?
you ask and of course it’s about death,
they’re all about death,
every poem ever written—ever—is about
death. Lyrics? Death. Love poems? Death.
Ballads, odes, epics? Death! I guarantee you
that the man from Nantucket is deeply concerned
about his own mortality. He will die, the flowers
will fail, and the sun will burn out like someone’s
forgotten cigarette. I will die, and you, my only love,
will die as well. In light of which the sensible course would be
to spend the remaining moments of our too-brief lives
in bed, with wine and maybe some pie to sustain us,
sleeping the luxurious hours between desire and desire.
But we are too American.
Except for the occasional vacation in Italy,
where they don’t have good pie but make up for it
with sex in the afternoons, we turn love and fear
into work, and I am sitting in bed scribbling
as if words could save anything from anything. History
does not record whether Mr. Marvell finally got laid,
only reprints his poem again and again so that generations
of high school students can appreciate the anatomical specificity
of his vegetable love—and also the opportunity to hear
their teachers say “adore each breast” out loud in class—
but three-hundred and fifty years out he still loves her fair self
and so I would you. If no one reads this except our nieces,
going through our papers when we’re dead (hello, girls!),
astonished, as the young always are, to find
that they have not invented sex after all, still, let them
know this: what we had was made of time.
That it could not last was always the point.
.
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Collected Poets Series 