Confessional Poem
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Confessional Poem
The girl next door had something to teach me about what to air: On the line somebody’s business gets told then recounted; it’s best to thread a tale for the neighbors, an orchestration of sorts. But I am far from modest in my telling of lies. There are three references I put forward: each a past lover who liked a different kind of underling to his genius. You wouldn’t know it from the delicates I roll into the yard. It’s all the same peek-a-boo lace and stunted imagination. Of course, all of this is scanty truth. Who hangs anything out to dry anymore, when invention has halved the work? [End Page 208]
Rosa Alcalá, a native of New Jersey, is author of two chapbooks of poems, Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna) and Undocumentary (Dos Press). She has translated Lila Zemborian’s Guardians of the Secret (forthcoming from Noemi Press) and co-translated (with Mónica de la Torre) Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna). She is an assistant professor at El Paso’s University of Texas, where she teaches creative writing.
