Susan McLean
Deep Cover
Nakedness is the best disguise.
When you discard the final veil,
it always takes them by surprise.
Because men think that compromise
is weak--that if you yield, you fail--
nakedness is the best disguise.
Though you expose your breasts and thighs,
your mind is as opaque as shale.
It always takes them by surprise
to find out that the body lies.
Surrender can conceal betrayal.
Nakedness is best. Disguise,
equivocation, alibis
can be seen through. To lay a trail
that always takes them by surprise,
hide nothing, and you'll blind their eyes.
Go ask Judith. Go ask Jael.
Nakedness is the best disguise.
It always takes them by surprise.
Desire
Desire casts out her net, and you forget
the way you thrashed and gasped in it before.
Though you're too old to want to play coquette,
desire casts out her net
of loss and longing that you can't ignore,
floated by lies and weighted with regret.
Your feet, you think, are firmly on the shore;
you're not a fool, to play Russian roulette
with all you care for, just to feel once more
that mad, electric vertigo. And yet
desire casts out her net.
Hazard
The boys who asked you out were never quite
the ones haunting your fantasies at night--
but roses that aren't picked will still turn brown,
and losing is the only game in town.
The ample curves that once were your allure
now give you backaches that you can't endure.
In pain, even your smile looks like a frown--
but losing is the only game in town.
Your grandmother, one friend and then another,
your childhood crush, your father and your mother--
you can't afford it, but you lay them down
when losing is the only game in town.
You hope a few more sunny days are due.
Time answers, "They will come, but not for you."
So "dream," which was a verb, becomes a noun.
Losing is the only game in town.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
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Susan McLean is a professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University
in Marshall, Minnesota. Her poems and translations have appeared in Atlanta Review, The Formalist, Iambs and Trochees,
Arion, Measure, The Classical Outlook, and elsewhere. In 2004 she won a McKnight Artist Fellowship/Loft Award in Poetry,
and in 2006, the Leslie Mellichamp Prize from The Lyric. In October 2006, her chapbook Holding Patterns was published by Finishing Line Press.
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Melissa Balmain
Lorna Knowles Blake
Catherine Chandler
Jehanne Dubrow
Anna Evans
Midge Goldberg
Dolores Hayden
Juleigh Howard-Hobson
Julie Kane
Luann Landon
Susan McLean
Julia Randall
Terri Witek
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Therese Chabot creates delicate, ephemeral installations – carpets, dresses and crowns – using flower petals and natural materials to speak of the stages of life and the paths we are given to choose from. |
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