-
Remembering Lot's Wife
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2002
- p. 444
- 10.1353/cal.2002.0101
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Callaloo 25.2 (2002) 444
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Remembering Lot's Wife
Jonathan Smith
Too soon, perhaps,
Missing satin dresses, lemonade, gin.
Hartman's profound baritone.
Standards.
Coltrane on tenor.
But she said.
No, she never
Said, never said.
The satin, the cigarette smoking,
The nodding, too, to ice cube clinking lush life.
Missing? No. She never said,
Never said what a g-d would, would not do.
She? She never said she'd give her girls—
To crowding, surging, knocking, to men
About her house. Her doors about to give.
No, Lord, she never said. In life never:
In. Go. Yes. I. Or no, Lord, or no.
Who knows what she hears, what behind her?
Filter-tip doll singing? The anonymous choir
Already going oh-oh-mary in the background?
Jonathan Smith is an assistant professor of American studies at St. Louis University. His poems have appeared in a number of periodicals, including Obsidian II, Quarterly West, and Crab Orchard Review.
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