Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the 2007 Perugia Press First Book Award
and 2008 Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. Her poetry has appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Southeast Review, Poetry International, Margie , Sou’Wester, Ploughshares and Spillway, among other journals. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Thompson was commissioned in 2010 by Emory University to write poems in collaboration with choreographer Anna Leo and by Scripps College in collaboration with sculptress Alison Saar.---------
Meditation on Image and Attraction
To be in this world, ask:
what draws the body?
Some found object—
not of man’s making
but more natural and
bearing its own light:
Ansel’s sand dunes caught
in a black-and-white tango.
That’s it—the passionate
restraint, the rhythm of
a drawn line disappearing.
The artist’s lens said as much
about manipulating shadow,
equating deft fingers stroking
ebony and ivory with finessing
nuance, framing the rapture.
Is this the essential dilemma
driving us to love in the end?
Zuma Beach, 1968—
just a year after the Summer of Love
when my yellow Mustang was designed
for more than the Sunset Strip, we drove
past Santa Monica’s pier, the Colony
and our curfew. We floored it, then
parked by the moon and the grunion.
We brought along a flask of Mount
Gay rum, but it wasn’t enough.
I don’t remember the name of my make me
wanna shout or whether he or the automatic
gear ripped through my scanties. What
do I remember?—the drifter—his eyes grave
as unnamed planets; his breath piercing
the fog outside our fogged-up windshield;
his mouth, greedy and toothless as he
drooled for what we all want: to grapple
with flesh. Even now, I hear his laugh—
raucous—raw as a raven’s.
Gyre
All his volleyball of language,
the spiraling outward
of its giddy-up—
wordplay?
It can’t hold a candle
to his tongue
in my earbox,
his hand deeply into
my pocket of thighs
even when mute me—
blank page—disappears
into candle-light beneath
less than until—
*
He failed, of course,
to take
what should be
taken daily;
almost took me,
me of the trembling breast,
one small fist closed
around a homicidal pen.