Adrian Blevins is an associate professor of English at Colby College. She is the author of four books of poems. Her fifth book, Appalachians Run Amok,, which will be published next spring.
She writes about her work:
“I wrote poems and whole books, even, that spoke toward if not directly about (and sometimes directly about) how complicated it is to be female in the 20th and 21st American centuries. And a mother of three. And an introvert. And a southerner. And rural, rural, rural.”
Love Poem for the Proles
by Adrian Blevins
My unpredictability cancels out my fidelity, which cancels out
my trifling punk rock of a country heart which loves ruin
more than Easter eggs and real eggs laid by real birds in real nests
more than the female nakedness in the burnished black jacket
trying to sell me something here on the HuffPo where I spend all day
going from bad-news commotion to worse-news upshot
like it’s my expertise to catalogue the twenty-first century’s decomposition
like I went to school for that and wrote a book on that when really I’m just
lazy and domestic. Not yet a Granny in a rocker on a porch in West VA,
but, you know, little half-pink roses on smocks and a fat philodendron
in a white wire basket! I want to contradict the fluttery hankerings-after of woodpeckers
with suet and the white light of the Maine sun this one-time winter day
with maybe an umbrella that I want to buy at the Pottery Barn in Kittery
because the ads everywhere for them have evidently entered the wanton me
who’s easy to dupe as another contradiction I forgot to mention is,
I am a yacht of yearning for cotton sheets. I am a cruise liner of lust
for porcelain. And inside the uterus too since there’s no small human swelling
to cost me money there I count six or seven at least tiny blue bottles
for holding sad little notes marking my need for large leather bags
and a new suitcase that isn’t covered in airport dirt and skinny jeans
and boots and other overt markers of my leftist good intensions
such as bumper stickers to put on the suitcase saying in pithy little phrases
in especially hipster font how completely I relate
to the working stiffs jack-hammering out there right now
a new smooth street not ruined by potholes so I might get in my Honda
and drive by them and wave a wave saying they are they and I am they too
in a way thanks to my love for them. Hello Michael Johnny Catherine Isabella
and Duke! I am guilty of bad things such as I drank a gin last night
in a nice hotel that I later heard you were boycotting for better wages
so I’m writing this apologia from me and America that will not feed you to you.
Poem copyright © 2016 Adrian Blevins. Reprinted from The American Poetry Review, Vol. 45 No. 4, 2016, by permission of Adrian Blevins.