Poetry / Denise Duhamel
:: POEM IN WHICH I NEVER STOPPED DRINKING ::
I’m dead by now—car crash or bad fall. Or I’m still here, but feeling dead inside, yelling at Target cashiers or maybe staying home, my Tower Vodka delivered by Total Wine. I have more cringy stories or stories swirling about me. I might have slept with a student by now or a dean who’s a drunk like me. I might have been fired, actually, claiming my dismissal was all someone else’s fault. I never developed the good habit of flossing daily or trying to get eight hours of sleep in a row. I might have drowned in a pool or the ocean or a bathtub. I might have pissed myself in public. I have surely forgotten the rent check, credit card payment, lost my voter ID. I might have stopped writing poems entirely, with excuses about why they are stupid. I might have stopped reading them too. Or there I was, until I wasn’t—a high-functioning, lampshade-wearing jokester who tripped on a step and hit her head, who tore through that stop sign on her way home.
:: POEM IN WHICH I BEFRIEND ROYALTY ::
During quarantine a lizard so green she looked like a toy latched onto the screen door of my balcony— she must have climbed a tree. The sound of her scared me. My blinds closed, I thought she was someone trying to break in. I peeked through the slats ready to scream, ready to dial 911. The foot-long lizard had climbed as far as my knee and I shook her off, gently, afraid she would rip the mesh. I kept talking to her the whole time. I was so lonely that Florida winter, I almost invited her inside. She had matching lime green eyes. When I googled her later I learned she was a Cuban Knight. Clearly she was able to fend for herself. Still I mashed a banana and served it to her, al fresco, on my best earthenware.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems are from a series in which all the titles contain the word “in which.” I began this series as a way to imagine other outcomes to my life or what might have been—a prose poem, for example, in which I never became sober and am possibly dead. But the “in which” was also expansive enough to bring me to glimpses elsewhere—private moments of shame or loneliness, imaginative leaps into the inner workings of my body. For me, it’s been a magical literary device, the “which” like a “witch” casting her spell. The work in this series has gone in surprising directions, the titles tethering me down. I find it increasingly liberating to state my premise in the title, to let the title do a lot of the work to ground a reader.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.