I could reduce my friends
to one or two, by ignoring them, playing
the clown, playing nice
or playing the dating
field till it’s furrows and frost, being the baby
of my graduating class, who never
graduated so much as got bona fides
for endless fights, training myself amid my own
hard hailstone’s
worth of emotional
baggage. I could feel clever
with quips between punches or
punchlines or feel free
to star in a war, or in the Dartmouth
College winter
carnival, or melt into the mist
of grown-up class clowns, recividists and
decent comedians, giving cold shoulders
to hot promoters, doing their bit
parts in a tragedy. Sleet
dreams. I hardly
mist you. Why
the flurry? Secretly
sad, I carried the seed
of an apocalypse in my coldest
of cold hearts, harbored a fimbulwinter
of eternal discontent. Now, being
out, I can join my once and former
beard, bisexual disaster
situation, and captain on our
ship that works like an ice-
breaker, giving short notice
to would-be vice
squads hoping to bust us, re-splice
our genes, give us inquisitive
get-back-in-your-closet advice
or else entice
us with material rewards: “It’s a roll of the dice,
but you could be in pictures, kid, if you just keep quiet as mice
about who you are.” To them I say: stick it
in your fishing
hole. We’re here. We no longer need
permission. You can’t freeze us out. We won’t ask twice.
Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.