ISSUE EIGHT
August 1999

Mark Bibbins

bibbins.jpg (2607 bytes)   Mark Bibbins lives in New York City and teaches a poetry workshop at The New School. His first collection, Swerve, appears in Take Three: 3 (Graywolf Press). Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Boston Review and elsewhere.

Slutty    Click to hear in real audio

Life is inevitably disgusting
                                 —Auden


We couldn't get near the bathroom
                       with all the models

holding back their hair
over the bowls.

The chef barely knew how to fling
parsley, so in the end      no one mourned

the hors d'oeuvres' demise.
The champagne was another story.

                       A great mystery
to me as well you should be,

your legs seemed longer when
you cartwheeled under streetlights.

Straddle me and I'll give you
all the scandal, all the sugar.


          —Exactly what might one do
with all the sugar anyway?

Caress     may still be the right word,
the streets     dark and aflash

with rain     sliding through the city
on its way. A third party wants

in, that warmth. You love
the noise stars make when they fall.

In the morning             we are knocked around
by the wind      of approaching trains.

You play the drawn-on eyebrow,
            you play the figure-me-out—

            I'd like something too,
                        to tear at me. 

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Mark Bibbins: Poetry
Copyright � 1999 The Cortland Review Issue EightThe Cortland Review