This week’s poem has a verbal audacity and a headlong associating momentum that puts a smile on my face at the same time that it makes me feel for and with a speaker who wishes she’d better learned what love is as a girl.

Adrian Blevins teaches at Colby College. Her most recent book is “Appalachians Run Amok,” which won the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press and appeared in 2018.

Apologia

By Adrian Blevins

As for love I’m in favor

but how to say it is frankly

the hindrance if you were

a heartfelt monkey as a girl

or a wind-up toy monkey

or a just a honey monkey

stupid on the back of a bike.

A monkey in a school play

on monkeys! A monkey

with a monkey for a heart

watching Jane Fonda & Jane

Seymour & Jane Goodall

on TV to learn the basics

such as how to kiss & dress

& who to moon for or dupe

& ditch & block or shut in

& asphyxiate. About love

I am saying there should have been

in those mountains a Cherokee

with clichéd feathers for a hat

& a series of instructions

made of hand waves & smoke

& little hearts & arrows

drawn in the dirt meaning

“touch here & here & good

& go” while above the feathers

flit fairies like in Disney

& Shakespeare & fireflies

like in real life in summer

in Virginia with their heat

all over the whole situation

like love’s a bang or a kiln

& not this other nighttime

repentance thing in January in Maine

so tongue-tied & faraway.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Adrian Blevins. It appeared originally in “Appalachians Run Amok” (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and appears here by permission of the author.