Poetry by Eileen Myles

Image by Tom Moore / tommooreillustration.com

The Dogfather

 

It rained

and now the sky is kind of orangey

I had Jen & Carol to dinner

or they had me.

We ate in a restaurant

friends & family

that’s what matters. Love

and the state of the world.

When you take something

there’s a feeling context

even if it’s a lie

 

I washed your bed and pinned

it before. You’d torn it open with your

nails. You got any safety

pins. No.

 

I went to the tailor, Jimmy.

Jimmy gave me pins. The bed

survived the wash. The sleeping bag

bed my other

dog died in. Is it cool

you call this home. Honey can’t

 

sleep with pins so probably

what will happen is

I will sew. When Michael

was a Buddhist

he asked me to put some stitches

in his robe. You want me

to do this. Yes. Michael was proud.

I felt my face

flooded with love. No shame. It wasn’t

even feminine. I put my crooked

stitches in his robe. Hands that’d

only sewn puppet clothes

just once in my life.

 

I can do this for you now.


 


 

 

Contemporary Poem

 

when

somebody

walks

between

cars

somebody’s

going

to

pull

a gun

I think

about

that

the thing

you don’t

get in any

of the

media

about here

is how

distracted

it is. The

music

is loud

you walk

through

crescendos

all the

time. That’s

a normal

ex-

perience

you know

 

 



Eileen Myles has published nineteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems and a re-issue of Chelsea Girls, both out in fall 2015 from Ecco/Harper Collins. She has received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Writers Grant, the Shelley Memorial Award for poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for her novel Inferno. She lives in New York City.