To You, After You've Read my Poems
To the Man Who Said Reading my Poetry Was "More Intimate Than Sex
To You, After You've Read my Poems
I’ve made you angry. You wanted me to
provide a service, and now that it’s over
and I haven’t shown you what you were
looking for, you feel ripped off, cheated, tricked.
But consider The Persistence Of Memory,
how when the novelty fades, it can’t help
but remind you of what your old friends used to draw
in basements with magic marker, heads
full of acid. Most artists can only see
what you saw then, can only feel that
stinging disenchantment you felt when
you realized, on seeing them in person,
that your idols are flat and crude imitations, tangible
extensions of emptiness failing to provide
the answer you were looking for. Most paintings are
small. Most painters don’t know
a thing about being or oblivion.
You could say most are just fucking around.
Let me tell you now I never claimed to
know a thing about nothingness or how
you should live. My poems, cold wax sculptures
just real enough to entice you to touch them,
like the Mona Lisa is a pretty girl
you lust after until you learn she’s not
over her high school bullies and her
shitty parents. Yes, it’s tragic, but
isn’t it also beautiful the way you ache
when she makes you remember? Isn’t it
beautiful the way the crowds gather round her
still, desperate and awed
to be lost there together, squinting
at her tiny image through the glass?
To the Man Who Said Reading my Poetry Was "More Intimate Than Sex"
I think you wanted to shove your fingers
into those pieces I sent you, force them open,
drink what flowed out: dark swirls, or whatever
other phrasing you thought looked better
on your lips than it could have in mine.
It takes a certain kind of arrogance
to see the crystal surface of a lake at dawn
and dive in naked, the black silt clouding
as it loosens in waves from your folds.
You stiffen within them, ogling
small schools of tetra and tiger barb
as you interrupt their shape
those roughly-fingered poems mere suggestions
you could rinse your feet in.
I should have known then
whatever these hands made would be a hole.
Kat Giordano is a poet and massive millennial crybaby from Pennsylvania. She is the former poetry editor for Lake Effect and the former managing editor of Lit.cat. Her work has appeared in Water Soup, The Cincinnati Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Menacing Hedge, and more. In 2016, she was a finalist for Erie County Poet Laureate at age 21. In 2017, she graduated from Penn State Behrend in Erie, PA with a degree in creative writing. As of November 2017, she is the co-editor of Philosophical Idiot. She currently lives in Pittsburgh where she works as a legal writer. Right now, she is probably either apologizing to someone for apologizing too much or distractedly staring at a random point over their shoulder while wondering if she should.
