Heather Hartley is the author of Knock Knock (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and Paris Editor for Tin House magazine. Her poems, essays and interviews have appeared in Tin House, Mississippi Review, Post Road and other magazines, and numerous anthologies, including Food and Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast;
and Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House. She lives in Paris, where she curates Shakespeare & Company Bookshop's weekly reading series, and teaches creative writing and poetry at the American University of Paris.The Haberdashery of the Missing E
Tap dancing is fascinating to do with your groom or husband. Try at
midnight, in dark, on slick shiny floors. Try in a long-tail coat and top hat,
you and your husband or groom. It's dancing by moons. It's X marks the
spot. Try tapping through nights. Tap-dancing, you know, stops insomnia
and fights.
Nine lives in ten or eleven lines
I'm flying down into my true love's arms from Frankfurt,
with fifty people on a two-hundred fifty passenger plane, night flight,
with three seats to myself, without having paid the rent—
that kind of grace and disgrace at the same time—
the way we live our lives.
When I want to say something devastating
it usually sounds like a perfume commercial:
mesmerized for five seconds then fade to black.
People accidentally die and give birth in the air.
And marriage? It could be accidental at 10,000 feet.
The night is a terrible city sometimes.