I Want to Fuck Your Poem by Tammy Delatorre
Everything you said about poetry, I wanted to get naked with. You quoted the immortals: W.H. Auden saying we’re making a “verbal object,” Carl Sandburg claiming a poem was “an echo asking a shadow to dance,” and Howard Nemerov stating that poetry was “a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them.”
There was also the way you ate as you taught, as if eating reflected your appetite for beauty. We discussed poems, and you wolfed down jelly beans and pumpkin bread and a green apple, which you promptly spit out and said, “That’s the sourest thing I’ve ever tasted.” I wanted to write a poem about you spitting out that apple.
After class, after you heard my writing, you said I was talented. You made a point of saying you rarely said that to writers, although I was sure you did.
Later, after I read two of my pieces at a poetry slam you promoted, you nodded and winked as if my words proved your point.
A few months later, I was back in one of your every-once-in-a-while classes, a prose writer hoping to crossover, a poet wannabe. You didn’t recognize me. You can’t be expected to remember every student, even the ones you deemed talented.
You read your poem about a woman being found at a gas station in a nightgown, forgotten where she had come from, forgotten where she was going, throwing money at cars. I wanted to fuck your poem.
You read another about being in a house, about the streams and trees outside. It made me feel a comfort in homes, a safety from the world as it is now. I wanted to fuck that one, too.
The class organizers had printed your second poem on lovely paper with a piece of art. You joked that your poem defaced the painting. On a break, I went to the back of the room to buy it, but there was no one at the table. A sign said $5 for the poem-art. I just wanted the poem. I wanted to get it into the back seat of my car and have my way with it. Rub the words against my bare breasts. Later, I returned, but still no one was there. I had the equivalent of blue balls, wanting your poem but unable to have it.
Another Saturday back in your intermittent class, you didn’t seem to recognize me again, although you bear-hugged others, said it was nice to see them and called them “doctor.” Doctor Sebastian. Doctor De Paz. I wanted you to call me doctor, too.
“Are you really a doctor?” I asked Howie sitting next to me.
“No, I’m a retired space engineer.”
“But you have a PhD?”
“No, but I helped design the space shuttle.”
I turned my attention back to you, now standing with theatric flare at the head of our long table, giving us writing exercises: Write about the end of something important; write about something that signifies a change in season. All of the exercises designed to conjure imagery or sensory detail. None of what I wrote was any good, so I prayed you wouldn’t call on me to read my writing as an example. As the last step, you told us to bring pieces from the various exercises together into a single poem. The words came easier then, wrapping around my sadness over never having a baby. Although the images alone had been nothing, congregated around my close-to-closing procreative ability, they sang.
Howie read his poem first. He got to decide which direction the readings would go around the table. I wanted him to choose my direction so I could read and get it over with, but he chose the other way, which meant the women dressed in a beautiful multi-colored shawl would go. She looked like a poet. And indeed, she read something lyrical. I was struck by each image, felt jealous, thinking you’d want to fuck her poem. Hell, I wanted to fuck her poem, and so it went, around the table in this manner. With several poems, I thought, Wow, that was amazing; I want to fuck that. I was the last one to read, the only non-doctor, non-poet in the room.
As I read, the class quieted, the woman across from me started to cry, yet you handed me a purse-sized packet of Kleenex. I placed my hand over the crumpled tissue, something you had given only to me.
After I read you asked, “That just happened? Just now?”
I wanted to say, No, my whole life, but I knew what you meant, so I said, “Yeah, fresh ink.” I rubbed my finger on the page and held it up for you to see the smudge. Instead of looking at my finger, you leaned awkwardly over someone’s shoulder to peek at the scribbles in my notebook, as if hoping to get a glimpse of a stanza’s sexy side boob, a carnal hunger on your face. Perhaps I had done it: created a poem you wanted to fuck. And what does it mean if I can create a poem and not a baby? I can jump in bed with this poem or the next, be poet promiscuous, birth a few of my own, and still it’s a crude substitute for the thing I couldn’t create fucking.
Tammy Delatorre was recently named a Steinbeck Fellow and has received other literary awards. Her writing has appeared in Hobart Online, Zone 3, The Rumpus, and Vice. She obtained her MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Read more of her work at www.tammydelatorre.com.
Wow Tammy that is incredibly raw & poignant-so authentic & honest- I’m in awe
After 45 years hanging out with poets, at last someone has spoken to my feelings of insignificance and inarticulate inadequacy while paddling through the swell of everyone else’s words and waiting for my wave to break. Thank you for sharing this journey and hurrah for your moment.