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.
