by Lisa Rosenberg
Dear Miss Dickinson, Ms. Plath, and Mr. Eliot,
My reveries of having tea with the three of you are repeatedly marred by an intrusive image of this transpiring at a supermarket Starbucks. In the suburbs.
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Dear Reader,
Not wanting to disappoint, I have eaten the plums. And the white chickens.
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Dear Famous Poet Who Was Briefly My Instructor,
Looking back at what I wrote in your class, I’m puzzled by your faith in me, or I overestimated it. Not sure which.
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Dear Fellow Poet/Peer,
Your recent hospitalization most likely has nothing to do with the misguided, childish curse I muttered upon learning you’d won that lucrative prize so many of us competed for. Congrats?
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Dear Legendary Intellectual,
It was a thrill to meet you at your book-signing ages ago. When recalling this encounter, I replace my giddy smile with coherent speech.
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Dear Ms. Woolf,
Forgive me for liking The Hours. And for not delivering on the room thing. FWIW, headspace, floorspace, and time have a more complex relationship these days.
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Dear Middle School Tormentor,
This is just to say
I came across
you online
during breakfast
How cold
to find your
aesthetic decline
so sweet
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Dear Long-Since Retired OB-GYN,
No, I didn’t know you wrote poetry. The exam table remains among the last places on Earth I might’ve wanted to read it.
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Dear Partner,
Our bond has survived the thought experiment in which there is nothing else left in the house to read, not even the emergency shutdown instructions on the water heater, yet your copy of my book retains its pristine, untouched condition.
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Dear Ms. Gross,
Sometimes I suspend my fantasies of our Fresh Air interview long enough to consider weaving them into an absurdist play.
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Dear Mom/Mum and Dad,
Robert Hayden said it best. But so did Larkin.
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Dear (Same) Partner,
All those Costco spy thrillers you’ve read at least twice have migrated, as if on little cat feet, to a donation bin.
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Dear Fellow Metrical-Foot Fetishist,
I love that antepenultimate is a double dactyl.
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Dear Editor,
I think I hear you striking the previous entry. And this one. While we’re in tautological hell, let me add that practically no one plays with prosody anymore.
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Dear Anonymous,
Thank you for so much splendid work, and some of the limericks. I really like “The Rabbi’s Gift,” by the way, but find myself critiquing kitsch renditions proliferating on the Internet.
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Dear Reader,
I’m looking up kitsch right now. Because, precision. And spelling.
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Dear (Same) Reader,
In the interest of transparency, I was hoping you’d admire how quickly I admitted to looking up kitsch. Most people don’t realize (give two fucks about) the extraordinary lengths poets go to in selecting le mot juste: assessing not only nuances, but also vowel pitch, alliteration (not as revered as your grossly underpaid English Lit teachers have led you to believe), assonance (all but eclipsed by widespread—foppish?—attention to alliteration), stress patterns, etymology, tone, and an array of potential connotations (including urban slang, impossible to keep up with), and intertextual associations that are never comprehensive enough, however exhausting. And then, if it does not seem a moment’s thought…! Wanting anyone but other poets to appreciate one’s artistry is a catch-22, augmented by a crushing, societal indifference from which Instagram poets are stunningly exempt. As are novelists, on the whole. This might be the place to confess that despite both reading the novel and seeing the movie of Lord of the Flies in high school, my sole recollection of the book is the cover. And I only know the first line of “Howl” by heart, even though I committed the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to memory in my late teens. Lastly (almost), in a stroke of patriarchal cosmic irony, I just burned dinner.
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Dear Well-Meaning Relative/Friend/Complete Stranger,
I smiled politely, but I really wanted to say someone else should write a poem about that.