Christina Pugh

SINGER

If you’ve heard the cant of the auctioneer, the

“do I hear twenty-one,” the voice of a tenor

calling among straw, don’t you see how music

enthralls the marketplace?  Singer, you

appeared to me alive again, clothed in

bright satin:  I’d arrived at your party

in New York.  In the clerestory, girls

were posing for a photograph, their skirts

sea-foam as my mother’s was in 1956.

You closed your hand on mine so I could

see the ruined seam between our two

worlds, the living and the dead–neither

of us mothers.  But if you live in my ear,

so I too might live again—as an inkling,

the flame between a number and the

welling of a wish that stops the cry:

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

LOTUS CROSS-DRESS

That scroll of the lotus bud will

smoke, unopened:  its petals light

a taper:  its windowed pages swirl

cylindric, fever blushes channeled

up the tip.  To unfurl them now

would be blissful hypothetical–

try to imagine it by cutting a

French novel with a pearl-

handled knife, or loosening

a corset’s stays, or peeling

a girdle to let discord flame

between a face’s testimony and

the mystery that swaddles

underneath.  The movies show

this abyssal consternation,

soon to be charred in love’s

consumption— when the suitor

finally sees and doesn’t

care, doesn’t care.

Author: Christina Pugh

Christina Pugh is the author of six books of poems, including The Right Hand (Tupelo Press, 2024) and Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize in Poetry. In 2024, she also published a book of essays on poetry titled Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century (University of Michigan Press “Poets on Poetry” series, 2024), which was a recommended book in Choice.  Her poems have appeared widely, including in The Atlantic, Poetry, Yale Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she has also received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry magazine, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and others.  She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was recently named Distinguished Scholar of the Year in Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture.  Her website is christinapughpoet.com.

Plume: Issue #18 December 2012