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Everyone knows an unworshipped woman will betray you.

Lucie Brock-Broido, “Domestic Mysticism,” from A Hunger

#lucie brock broido #poetry #a hunger #women #penguin random house

With this poem, we remember Lucie Brock-Broido, who died on March 6, after a brief illness. Knopf's inboxes overflowed with expressions of sympathy and admiration from poets near and far, and memories of a fiercely steadfast artist and teacher, whose exacting poetics influenced several generations of students. "Heartbeat" is from her first collection, A Hunger (1988), which introduced the world to her highly original domestic mysticism (as she herself called it), and about which Helen Vendler wrote, "Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon—'perfect mean lines.' This part valuably adds astringency to her passion for the beautiful . . . The poems leap off the page."

Heartbeat

Let me be brief then I will go on worshiping the perfect mean lines, the light on them visible only through the neon signs of life, the parts which glow all night when peaceful sorts are sleeping, when the wanderers are still avenging their insomnia in the dark false hellebore red of poolhalls, in the allnight pastel caves of laundromats, in the wrong decade coffee shop in Ypsilanti where even the manager can’t lend the key to the men’s room, I love these things too, the self serve filling station where a pale hand sneaks out making silver change, or the one dark palm in the meat shop on Amsterdam & 110th behind the curtain handing out the little envelopes of Heartbeat, I covet these things too, some third world after this one & the one that goes hereafter, in that world you will be important, devoured by the fawns, inscrutable Christmas rose, toxic in your leather coat phase for a long time worshipping the long blonde stains left after light & after fire.

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#poetry #National Poetry Month #luise brock-broido #a hunger #poem-a-day 2018