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    What It Doesn't Have to Do With: Poems
    What It Doesn't Have to Do With: Poems
    What It Doesn't Have to Do With: Poems
    Ebook75 pages27 minutes

    What It Doesn't Have to Do With: Poems

    By Lindsay Bernal

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    About this ebook

    Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The elegiac meditations throughout this collection link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems. Through quick turns and juxtapositions, Lindsay Bernal navigates the paradoxical states of grief and love, alternating between vulnerability and irony, despair and humor. Her wry, contemporary voice confronts serious subjects with unpredictable wit.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2018
    ISBN9780820353951
    What It Doesn't Have to Do With: Poems
    Author

    Lindsay Bernal

    LINDSAY BERNAL holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, where she has coordinated the creative writing program and taught as a lecturer for over a decade. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gulf Coast, OVERSOUND, Tikkun, and other journals.

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      Book preview

      What It Doesn't Have to Do With - Lindsay Bernal

      I.

      Heartbroken in Your Memoir

      Thank you for immortalizing me

      in half a sentence while you, the protean

      go-getter, feed me soup, jasmine-tip tea.

      If I were to meet my 21-year-old self

      now, I’d never befriend her, but you fell into my lap—

      literally—the night Ryan drugged us & I begged you

      to get me the hell out of Lowell.

      Thank you for that & for your Lady-of-Shallot look,

      for being the only girl I kissed at the lesbian party

      we’d waited all fall for, somewhere

      on the Lower East Side, almost too east

      to count back then—when Queens was still cheap,

      my life a milky white, opaque & vague.

      Who among us hadn’t been compromised:

      one morning waking up saying to nobody,

      how did that happen? Then walking home

      in the same clothes we’d laid out

      the day before, in shoes not meant for distances

      or daylight, past everyone with headsets

      commuting to Wall. After six months

      you left & I moved to the R’s last stop,

      my apartment so close to the tracks it shook.

      The Pre-Raphaelite Effect

      1

      Midafternoon, the hum of porn fills the room:

      a redhead in a diaphanous catsuit

      (love-bite on her breast-swell),

      fearing no bondage,

      no slap of the whip.

      Foreplay and more foreplay and a song sung on the soundtrack.

      "Amber Lemons is from Jersey, not Malibu,

      went to Catholic School."

      How do you know that?

      Then she comes twice

      nose-down like a small animal

      in faux grass by the kidney-shaped pool.

      Is she faking? Is she faking?

      2

      Paramour—that’s what I’d like to be called.

      If we hadn’t skipped so many steps at the start

      you’d know my mom is part

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