At a wine bar, the sommelier queries Do you want body or complexity? I hesitate, weighing this choice. My body craves complexity, again. I have simplified my life: I write. I love. Each with the clarity of a city skyline seen from a distance after a rainstorm. My muddied boots neatly stashed. Long ago, when I first joined Facebook, I checked the relationship option: It’s Complicated. Having found myself caught like a lazy housefly in my own intricate web. I’m out with younger poets. I try to parse the complex syntax of their lives— familiar yet foreign. Like returning to a city after decades or encountering a former lover and remembering only the language of his tongue on your skin. Perhaps the body can hold only so much memory. My mouth cradles words of advice. How easy to clarify butter, reduce sauce with experience. Tazzelenghe, the sommelier says, pouring the red wine, it means cut the tongue.
Heidi Seaborn is author of the PANK Poetry Prize-winning An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks, as well as the chapbooks Once a Diva and Finding My Way Home. Her recent work in Beloit Poetry Journal, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Diode, Financial Times of London, Missouri Review, The Offing, Penn Review, Pleiades, The Slowdown and the Washington Post. Heidi is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from NYU. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
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