Ann Pedone

the first part of her story

SHE SAID: No. You’re totally wrong
It’s simply that I refuse  to wear deodorant

It was a night so thick it might have been a dream

SHE SAID: I can’t talk right now because my mouth
is full of all of this

OINTMENT

SHE SAID: When you get here, I have to
show you this. I found a secret duct in the floor over by
the toilet

Make sure you grab a really big flashlight
like they have at Home Depot
and then we can 
see what’s down there

I know it’s something beautiful

After I got the key & was trying to find the room
two guys in the parking lot tried to pay
me to suck them

One offered thirty
The other one, fifty five

This parking is obviously full
of an over-abundance of

MEANING

In college I read a lot of Russian poetry

AKHMATOVA, TSVETAEVA

But always in English

Russian is a really fucking hard
language to learn

Then one day I leaned over into a
really really big blue bowl

Now I never read that stuff anymore
     

Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks and The Italian Professor’s Wife. Her work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, Chicago Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Best American Poetry’s Pick of the Week, and elsewhere. website