theresa m lapensée

musings & other stories

Influences

Browen Wallace, "A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf"

I wasn't going to make excuses for being a woman/ blaming years of silence for leaving us

so much to say...it wasn't going to mention history or

choices or women's lives, the complexities of women's friendships/ or the countless gritty details of an ordinary woman's life that never appear in poems at all.

Leonard Cohen, "Suzanne Takes you Down"

...she leads you you to the river,

she is wearing rags & feathers

from Salvation Army counters. The sun pours down

like honey on our lady of the harbour as she shows you

where to look among the garbage and the flowers.

Sue Goyette, "Kindred"

He knew how to live, dancing, abandoned, head back,

his feet a blur, a whirr of joy. He knew we all have our own

beginnings and they're all the same.

Charles Bukowski, "Nana"

She sits on my couch in a short blue dress and she

seems quite healthy and chipper even looks innocent.

"I lose interest in a man," she says, "as soon as he begins to care for me." I refill her drink.

e.e. cummings "6"

you shall above all things be glad and young.

For if you're young, whatever life you wear it will become

you; I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach a thousand stars how not to dance

Anne Sextion, "Clothes"

For a bra (need we mention it?),

the padded black one that my lover demanded

when I took it off.

He said, "Where'd it all go?"

Adrienne Rich, "Integrity"

Anger and tenderness: my selves,

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angles, not polarities.

J.D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey

Everything that everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making.