I’m extremely pleased to have a poem in the current issue of the Shore. “Dear Liz—” is a little love letter to Liz Phair’s first album, Exile in Guyville (1993). The poem was originally a shape poem, but it didn’t really work and so – after a few years and a few rounds of modifications – it settled into its current mode as a haibun. The allusion in the last lines is to the rock critic Robert Christgau, who must’ve written something memorable about the Rolling Stones that insinuated itself into the fabric of this poem.

Dear Liz—

you had me at ‘Fuck and Run’, your parched voice
like husks of sweet corn under a dying
August sun—Silver Queen, the only kind—all
sturm und twang, slight lisp betraying a shyness
undercut by your half-exposed nipple on the album
jacket. You drove us wild at nineteen, tired
of guys like ourselves running everything, screaming
their emo angst in our ears.

[read the whole poem at the Shore]