It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I crumple marriage offers made by fishermen, masons, bakers of brioche, for I know my consecration is to marry the great Van Gogh. Look at history and see men of genius wrecked before there is the chance for one brave girl to swoop down, dangerous to his enemies and doubters, the critics and hecklers, and save him from that storm. My love shall be his shield, prevent the terrible. No shy virgin, I’ve seen four decades; they have handled me the way some clumsy half- cocked violin restorer does a never- again-same harp. I know the score. I found Vincent living with his mother in these snake-filled backwoods, where gossips embroider the dangers of his past romancing of a whore. Sufficient to say I’m not scared off. Inside me, too, there is a prostitute and a barkeep, a seamstress and a siren and a shore. Note: In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about Margot Begemann, briefly his fiancée, “It’s a pity I didn’t meet her earlier—say 10 years ago or so. Now she gives me the impression of a Cremona violin that’s been spoiled in the past by bad bunglers of restorers.” He ended their relationship the same year it began. Margot drank poison but recovered.
Jenna Le is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011); A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association; and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and many other journals. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in mathematics and an M.D. and works as a physician and educator in New York City.
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