Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women

Marilyn L. Taylor

Nice Try

Higgledy-piggledy,
Higginson’s Dickinson
wrote in respectable meter and rhyme.
Nobody spotted the
proto-postmodernist
radical poetess, biding her time.

Latter-day Letter to ESVM

Edna St. Vincent Millay enjoyed the status of a best-selling poet in the 1920s, when her slim volumes could be found in every genteel home in the nation.
—Ernest Hilbert

Listen, Vincent. If I’d known you, if
I’d been your friend, here’s what I would have said
to you: get up. Kick that stranger out of bed,
and try to keep your clothes on long enough
to find a pen. Then write a line of verse
that wraps the adolescent century
in a feather boa—not the corsetry
of lofty lexicology—or (worse)
the virginal vernacular of swoon.
Dazzle us. Tell us how it must have been
to flicker through the past as libertine,
rippling with sequins, sonnets, saxophones.
Ah, the streets you could have danced us through—
Gifted practitioner, why didn’t you?

Again

The children are back, the children are back—
They’ve come to take refuge, exhale and unpack;
The marriage has faltered, the job has gone bad,
Come open the door for them, Mother and Dad.

The city apartment is leaky and cold,
The landlord lascivious, greedy and old—
The mattress is lumpy, the oven’s encrusted,
The freezer, the fan, and the toilet have rusted.

The company caved, the boss went broke,
The job and the love-affair, all up in smoke.
The anguish of loneliness comes as a shock—
O heart in the doldrums, O heart in hock.

And so they return with their piles of possessions,
Their terrified cats and their mournful expressions
Reclaiming the bedrooms they had in their teens,
Clean towels, warm comforter, glass figurines.

Downstairs in the kitchen the father and mother
Don’t say a word, but they look at each other
As down the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.
The children are back. The children are back.

AUTHOR BIO

Marilyn Taylor’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, The Formalist, Evansville Review, and many other journals. Her work won first place in recent competitions sponsored by Dogwood, Passager, The Ledge,and GSU Review, and she has received three Pushcart nominations. Her second full-length collection, titled Subject to Change (David Robert Books, 2004), was nominated for the Poets Prize. Marilyn is a Contributing Editor for The Writer magazine, where her articles on poetic craft appear regularly. She has taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and served as Poet Laureate of Milwaukee in 2004/05. Visit Marilyn Taylor’s website.

POETRY CONTRIBUTORS