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3 POEMS Benjamin Aleshire
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GOLF Immaculate expanse of manicured lawn—
__ EL OCÉAN Inside le caracól of tu oreille,
__ ELEGIAC FIELDS AVENUE for Alex Zaitchik, New Orleans The End of the World is a bar,
__ All three poems were composed in approximately ten minutes, in exchange for a voluntary donation from a passerby in the street. 'Golf' was for an aristocratic tourist in New Orleans who wanted an ode to his leisure sport of choice; I was worried he would be offended that I wrote about beating him to death with his own golf clubs, but he loved it, and said he would frame it at his country club. 'El Océan' was written in a patois of Spanish, French, and English for a tri-lingual Québécoise woman I met on an airplane when I was 19 and later made love to while we whispered feverish unkeepable promises to one another in three languages. Ten years later, she happened upon me in Union Sq, with her fiancé and his father, and asked for a poem about the sea. I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I would have refused to do it, but was so desperately poor at the time that I had no choice but to force myself to write it, through tears behind my sunglasses. 'Elegiac Fields Avenue' refers to Elysian Fields, the New Orleans boulevard named for the heroic Greek afterlife. The End of the World, too, is an actual location in New Orleans. |