I can’t tell you the amount of people who want me to write articles about ageing. Really? Guy at the top of his powers, is he asked to write about ageing? What, am I a rotting corpse out here? I thought I was having my moment.
—Eileen Myles (Interview with The Irish Times, by Una Mullally, 18 March 2017)
I tell you Myles’s Chelsea Girls
is like Adler’s Speedboat
with less money and more sex
because I used to use
the verb to come
like a diamond
borrowed all summer without asking,
the word curfew
an invitation to eat the air,
not like Plath but Baudelaire,
strolling past pissed-in stairwells
like there’s nothing to it: looking for whatever is.
You may as well tell me it’s time to crouch, to cup my hands
around the thawed-out bones of a sparrow, moss pillowing
beside paw prints expunged by spring rain,
time to tell the sweet lie those books abjured:
that for every emptied-out thing
something soft attends the nothing near it.
Annette Oxindine is a professor at Wright State University, where she primarily teaches courses in modern and contemporary British literature. Her poems appear in the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Southern Indiana Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.
Note: An earlier version of “Reissued” was published in the online journal Red Paint Hill, which ceased publication in 2018.