Brittany Perham, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize
Double Portrait
- All those times I said “forever”
- as in, “Will you love me forever?”
- then waited for you to say,
- “Yes, I will love you forever,”
- while you drained your glass and said
- instead, “There is no forever,”
- if in a bad mood or, if good,
- “You’ll be asking me about forever forever,”
- (grammatically suggesting, “until we die,”
- the happy equivalent of forever),
- I swiveled my stool, I drank my wine;
- I knew I’d be doing this forever
- come hell or high water,
- come a future minus you or forever,
- and it began to snow on the football fields
- on the TV screens, forever
- a comfort in the comforting bars
- that have been around forever,
- playing fields for every lover
- whose question about forever
- her lover can never answer
- even if he tries forever,
- even if he tells her, in his own words,
- the perfect line ending in “forever,”
- because the question she’s asking
she’s asking
- herself: “Will I love you forever?”
- I drain my glass.
- The answer could be yes.
Double Portrait
- When you’re dad-close
- I can smell your liver
- You build the house
- From the inside out
- Standing on the airy platform
- With a nail in your dad-teeth
- Hammer hammer
- It’s working isn’t it
- I’ll make a telephone
- With bean cans and string
- Hammer hello-o
- Your dad-eye watery close
- To the first wall’s last nail
- It’s as far down to the ground
- As I’ve ever seen
- Without a railing
- and when you’re dad-close
- I’ll stay with you girl-close
- I’ll girl-stay without falling failing until
- You’re on the ground or in it
Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (forthcoming from W.W. Norton, 2017), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press, 2016). She is a Jones lecturer in the creative writing program at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner fellow. She lives in San Francisco.