Clark Kent Rides the Subway
poetry by
catherine
03 July 2002
10 comments
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Superman took the A this morning
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he caught my eye between Fifty-Ninth and Forty-Second Streets
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tall, buffed, extravagantly jawed
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heather:
You know I liked "extravagantly jawed" -- still like it. |
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with waves of pert blond hair cascading
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to his manly shoulders, where they brushed his bright blue
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polyester shirt, open two buttons to show a perfect
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S of tanned and just-waxed chest.
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He smiled at me and asked
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if I would be his superhero fantasy queen
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j_moody:
i wonder if here, instead of just stopping with a clever compound pronoun, you might give us some examples of what you DO as a superhero fantasy queen-- things that he might explicitly ask you to do and which might nuance our sense of what it means to be such a queen... I guess I'm asking for more exposition. this part of the poem seems like an opportune time to expand on the notion, and the later snippets of flying and don't flesh out the role enough for me-- not as much as i belive you COULD flesh it out. maybe? |
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of course I agreed right away,
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though glancing down at the sticky
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patches of sweat on my own blue shirt I wondered
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if I were really right for the job.
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But after all I do have some journalistic
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experience and therefore can hide
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behind horn-rimmed glasses and blown-out curls
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no one will look at me twice while secretly
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I'm having super-hot sex in phone booths
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and maybe traveling sometimes high above the skyscrapers
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cradled in my man's arms as he makes the slow descent
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to earth. Actually, I'm pretty sure I know
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why he chose me: all around him on the train
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j_moody:
this, |
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were beautiful women looking at their books
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j_moody:
this, |
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or their nails or out the windows
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j_moody:
this, |
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at the dark and secret labyrinth rushing by.
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j_moody:
this, |
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I, far down the car, bathing in my own heat,
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j_moody:
and this |
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was the only one who noticed he was there.
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j_moody:
are particularly masterful, for all the reasons outlined below. |
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mwirth:
The conversational rhythm in this is nice. The content made me think.. It's still making me think. There is satire of the superhero-fantasy, but also a theme of alienation from fantasies (loss of innocence?) of the other women on the subway.. I guess I had to write that to figure it out. Is that what you are going for? |
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cgroom:
I really like this a lot. I'm not sure about the tempo and whether I want details to be more or less nested, but poetry's not my thing and it worked for me. What I really liked was the the structure of the content, moving from him (perfect) to dreams of being with him to doubts about self to the revalation that nobody else had even notice he was there -- as Rat says, that hammers home the theme of alienation, both from other people and also from our own fantasies. |
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Content © copyright 2002 by Catherine Osborne. All rights reserved.