Keetje Kuipers
I wasn鈥檛 trying to steal her boyfriend,
and he wasn鈥檛 her boyfriend anyway. Just someone
beautiful she鈥檇 slept with once. I hadn鈥檛 yet
learned the difference between a shadow cast
in the shape of my desire and the contract a body
makes with its own hunger. But I鈥檇 known beauty鈥�
its currency, its power. So I wanted to sleep
with him, too. How I went about it wasn鈥檛
that remarkable. I simply made myself appear
to be a thing he鈥檇 want: not me, but something
I could easily be mistaken for, like a bird, say,
pretending to be another bird. What I
craved from him was harder to cage. Beautiful,
beautiful, I鈥檇 heard people praised all my life.
Not the bird at all鈥攋ust the flutter that it raised.
Who among us doesn鈥檛 carry around at least a few remembered moments that鈥攚hen chanced upon by the rogue brain searching its archives鈥攊nspire in our more evolved selves a particular type of private and incendiary shame?
I wasn鈥檛 always my best self in my twenties. I was hungry all the time: for experience and pleasure and some seemingly unattainable acknowledgement of my worth. I imagine this isn鈥檛 an uncommon appetite to have when you鈥檙e young. Another word for it might even be聽鈥済谤辞飞迟丑,鈥澛�if growth were characterized by wreaking havoc.
Unfortunately, one of the casualties of being in thrall to our own hunger is the ability to fully see鈥攁nd respect鈥攖he people around us. As one of a number of poems exploring humility in my forthcoming collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, I wrote this poem as an attempt to understand the propulsive emotional blindness I intermittently experienced at that time in my life: where it came from, what it cost, and how I might forgive myself for it.
newest collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (forthcoming April 2025), was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her聽 poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and POETRY, and have been honored by publication in The聽 Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has been a Stegner聽 Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing聽 Resident. Kuipers lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is editor of Poetry Northwest.