Three Poems by Laura McCullough

I Am My Poems

Today I will wear clothes loose
about my frame so you might wonder
about my breasts. This will be after the day
I wore a tight shirt displaying them. I never
once looked down. That is the only way
to wear a low cut shirt. You were intrigued,
but your eyes will not have stared. Still,
in the non-looking, you looked, and I knew
and was glad. Today, when you saw me,
you hoped I would be wearing less,
but I wasn’t, and that was good.
You were relieved, breathed deeper,
the chest walls eased from the aching
and laughed a little since I could be
the chum you don’t really want me
to be. When we talk, I will say one
dirty thing. Just enough to let you know
I might, tomorrow, drop one piece
of clothing for you to pick up.

The Art of Seduction

First, one takes off her clothes.
No, that is the wrong strategy.
There is nothing honest in this,
in fact, it reveals too much.
The art of living is in the linearity,
the analogy most alluring
when the primary image evokes
the memory. Smell, for example.
The scent of garbage in the hall
of the apartment where you first
made love or the way peanut butter
and bananas can echo the warmth
of your mother when you were sick.
Never take off all your clothes. Never
stop watching. Know the difference
between what they want, but will
settle for. Wrap yourself in this
promise, but never keep it.
Encourage the odor of desire.
Use restraint, without being
restrained. Try everything, once.

Paradise on the Head of a Pin

"Evil is whatever distracts."
Franz Kafka

In the room where he waits, hunger
has become his friend and confidante.
When hunger returned after a long trip,
he ran toward it like a lost lover back
from desert travails with exotic stories
of horses and wild fruit. Now, he holds
hunger in his arms murmuring, tell me,
again, those stories. The details never
change, and, as time goes on, he begins
to tell the stories himself, so by heart
he knows them. After some time, they
have nothing left to tell. There is no
gnawing in his gut, though hunger is
there. In the pale light, clearly the bet
has been lost; he is satiated by hunger.
In all fairness, shouldn’t god let him go?

About the author:
Laura McCullough has an MFA from Goddard College, won a NJ State Arts Council Fellowship, was awarded the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholarship in poetry, and will attend the 2005 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She will deliver a paper on the poetics of Bruce Springsteen and Li-Young Lee at the first annual Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen Symposium in fall 2005 and a paper on Shelley and theories of poetry through science at The Mid-American's fifth annual Winter Wheat Writing Festival in Nov., 2005. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Iron Horse, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Nightsun, Boulevard, Poetry East, Exquisite Corpse, and others. Her first collection, The Dancing Bear, will be out in winter 2005 by Open Book Press. Her second manuscript, What Men Want is circulating. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.