Vers de Societe

By ISHION HUTCHINSON

 

Some meager talk of Larkin
over quiche and pâté, olives
the proclaimed ragamuffin
picked at as though our lives;

circumspect, the neutral host
blanched at pills and diaphragm,
shook her clipped head of frost,
insisted he please change from

that cold brute, to where life
is modest, the islands, perhaps,
not this social phalanx;
but he answered, none too vexed:

that’s the drivel of some bitch;
a gulf caved into her face;
the champagne flattened to piss;
cardiac breath, no one flaked,

waiting for blood on the ice,
an extremity, voice rifted
on voice; burred, tender, polite
in one spur, like crisped pomfret

forked in the eye, she said:
all solitude is selfish,
and effective only when dead;
be selfish. You won’t be missed.

 

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He has published one collection, Far District: Poems. He has won the Academy of American Poets’ Levis Award and the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.

Listen to Ishion Hutchinson and Jonathan Gerhardson read and discuss “Vers de Société” on our Contributors in Conversation podcast.

[Click here to purchase your copy of Issue 08]

 

Vers de Societe

Related Posts

Poetry Feature: Poems from the Immigrant Farmworker Community

MIGUEL M. MORALES
Days into the promise of a new year, resolutions plentiful, blossoming, / seven farmworkers were shot and killed harvesting mushrooms in Half Moon Bay. / Those of us who sprouted from families, whose hands and backs worked the land, / waited for news of our farmworker siblings.

A White House against a blue sky, with a watertower on top.

Two Poems by Liza Katz Duncan

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
First the marsh grass came, then the motherwort, / then bitterberry and honeysuckle. Blackbirds, / gulls and grackles built their nests. / Mourning doves call from the eaves / of the old factory, closed during the Depression.

sunflower against a backdrop of sunlight

August 2023 Poetry Feature

L.S. KLATT
My neighbor really has nothing to do / but mow his grass & watch television. / It’s the quiet life for him. The adhesive / bandage of his tongue comes out as / rarely as his partner. And the dog? I / could say anything about him & no one / would know the difference. That sounds / cruel.