Murphy Writing of Stockton College Presents

This entry is part of Getaway Reads, an e-mail series curated by Taylor Coyle that features the writing of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway faculty.

 

“What Do Women Want?”

by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

 

In Dreams

by Kim Addonizio

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left
for the man who was my father.
I hardly think of him anymore,
and those dreams I used to have,

in which he’d be standing in a room of people
I didn’t know—maybe his new friends,
if the dead have friendships—
those dreams no longer trouble my sleep.

He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through
or in the field by the highway
where I’m running, chasing down
some important piece of paper,

desperate to reach it
as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks
or flattened and marked by passing cars,
as it’s lifted again to swirl over

a broken wood fence. I don’t know why
the paper’s so important, or if anything
is even written there.
I don’t know where the dead go,

or why it’s good to forget them,
not to see them if they come crowding
the windows or trying to lay themselves down
and press along our bodies at night

and ask that we love them again,
that our sorrows include them once more.
This morning I couldn’t get up.
I slept late, I dreamed of the single

sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach
as it stuttered and soared over the grass
and a few flowers, so that I woke
with a sense of loss, wondering who

or what I had to mourn besides
my father, whom I no longer mourn,
father buried in the earth beneath grass,
beneath flowers I trample as I run.

 

© Kim Addonizio. “In Dreams” originally published in What Is This Thing Called Love, 2004. “What Do Women Want?” originally published in Tell Me, 2000.

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Kim Addonizio is an acclaimed poet, novelist and short story writer. Her new story collection, The Palace of Illusions, is being published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull in September 2014. She is the author of five books of poetry, two novels from Simon & Schuster, and two books on writing, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius (W.W. Norton). Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Addonizio’s work has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award and Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay. My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with artist Charles D. Jones, is forthcoming. Read one of her poems, “In Dreams”, and visit her online at kimaddonizio.com.

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Want to study with Kim Addonizio? At the 2015 Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Kim will lead three special sessions of Advanced Poetry Writing.

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