Duhamel, Denise

United States, (b. 1961)

Exquisite Candidate

  1. I can promise you this: food in the White House
  2. will change! No more granola, only fried eggs
  3. flipped the way we like them. And ham ham ham!
  4. Americans need ham! Nothing airy like debate for me!
  5. Pigs will become the new symbol of glee,
  6. displacing smiley faces and “Have A Nice Day.”
  7. Car bumpers are my billboards, billboards my movie screens.
  8. Nothing I can say can be used against me.
  9. My life flashes in front of my face daily.
  10. Here’s a snapshot of me as a baby. Then
  11. marrying. My kids drink all their milk which helps the dairy industry.
  12. A vote for me is not only a pat on the back for America!
  13. A vote for me, my fellow Americans, is a vote for everyone like me!
  14. If I were the type who made promises
  15. I’d probably begin by saying: America,
  16. relax! Buy big cars and tease your hair
  17. as high as the Empire State Building.
  18. Inch by inch, we’re buying the world’s sorrow.
  19. Yeah, the world’s sorrow, that’s it!
  20. The other side will have a lot to say about pork
  21. but don’t believe it! Their graphs are sloppy coloring books.
  22. We’re just fine — look at the way
  23. everyone wants to speak English and live here!
  24. Whatever you think of borders,
  25. I am the only candidate to canoe over Niagara Falls
  26. and live to photograph the Canadian side.
  27. I’m the only Julliard graduate —
  28. I will exhale beauty all across this great land
  29. of pork rinds and gas stations and scientists working for cures,
  30. of satellite dishes over Sparky’s Bar & Grill, the ease
  31. of breakfast in the mornings, quiet peace of sleep at night.

© Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. Exquisite Politics. Chicago: Tia Chucha Press (1997).

Pork

  1. No one warned me he’d long for loins and hocks
  2. so soon into our marriage. My husband munches from bags
  3. of second-choice pork rinds on the porch, not wanting to exclude me from the dinner
  4. he really wants to make. Back in college, his roommates loved his pork chops.
  5. At midnight he and his friends often drove to a diner famous for its spare ribs.
  6.  
  7. I catch my husband looking longingly at the pork.
  8. I’m on my way from the dairy aisle and, not wanting to make it an issue
  9. then, place the milk and cottage cheese in our cart
  10. loud enough to give him warning. He obediently slides over to the chicken
  11. and picks out a four-pack of yellow dimply breasts.
  12.  
  13. As a wife who doesn’t eat red meat, I feel inadequate. I wiggle my toes in the pink
  14. slippers he gave me for Christmas. I’ve read enough to know what happens
  15. when husbands don’t get what they want. Should he romanticize his unabashed
  16. pork-eating past, he’ll start to resent me — fast. I remember with a shudder
  17. his sheer pleasure when I passed him my slice of ham at our wedding reception.
  18.  
  19. Whenever we’re in a restaurant, he orders sides of bacon. I find cans
  20. of Spam and Bacos behind the breakfast cereal in the cupboard.
  21. I explain I’m not trying to hold him back, that he should eat pork in the house.
  22. I’m not self-righteous in my decision to keep boars and sows out of my diet.
  23. But always polite, my husband swears he doesn’t want to.
  24.  
  25. What’s the fun of eating sausage alone? My girlfriend, who loves pork too,
  26. makes her point. Of course, I feel worse. Aren’t I woman enough to meet
  27. my husband’s needs? Threatened, I confront him about his behavior
  28. at the pork counter. At first he doesn’t recall, then he says he was only looking.
  29. So now he’s only looking. Marriage disasters from my childhood sizzle.
  30.  
  31. Uncle Waldo always said, “Hey, it’s not a crime to look, is it?”
  32. when a good-looking “babe” walked by. But Aunt Charlotte knew it was.
  33. After a few years, she threw all his clothes out of the window, crying it’s over,
  34. calling him a swine. Always loving, my husband hugs and reassures me.
  35. I look down at my fuzzy slippers and feel better. Uncle Waldo hated pig’s feet.

© Denise Duhamel. Smile!. Harrisburg: Warm Spring Press (1993).

Animal Farm

  1. Old Major (Karl Marx) taught swine to read
  2. and organize. Snowball’s (Trotsky’s) Windmill
  3. flourished under Napoleon’s (Stalin’s)
  4. two-legged rule, oink rhetoric, the blight
  5. of the porcine underclass. Boars on hind
  6. legs carried placards that read, “Power to
  7. Barnyards!” They buried hams and eggshells, moved
  8. the furniture around for their convenience.
  9. Even donkey skeptics stopped using past tense
  10. and folded themselves into soft couches,
  11. forgetting the first commandment which said:
  12. “Animals are forbidden to sleep in beds.”
  13. Pillowcases and sheets kept in the shed
  14. were burned in that final Battle of Greed.
  15.  
  16. DD: Doesn’t Animal Farm resonate even more than when we initially read the book and wrote this poem? The pigs (the One Percenters) more piggy than ever? “All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” I feel such affection for this poem, maybe because it was rejected by more magazines than any of our other “little novels.” My submission notes indicate that we sent it out for over three years to seventeen different magazines before web del sol accepted it. I even wrote in our notes back and forth to each other that “Animal Farm” would have “good illustration possibilities” for Thalo. And, I have to admit, it’s one of my favorite illustrations in Caprice… (Stacey, can we paste the illustration in?) I wonder what happened to “Animal Farm 2.” We had two or four of each poem—we wrote, exquisite corpse, back and forth, both of us starting a poem at the same time.
  17.  
  18. MS: Thalo’s illustrations in both Oyl and Little Novels add so much to the text. Not to mention the new ones she drafted for Caprice. Her “Animal Farm” is one of my favorite visuals too, Denise. And what of our “Animal Farm 2”? Well, from the notes, we evidently thought it didn’t have a logical structure. Very funny, Younger Sonnet-writing Selves. I happened to find it in an old file just now, and it kind of sucks. Here are the last two lines, the best two, actually:
  19.  
  20. Too bad for the hens and sheep, ultra-kind
  21. barnyarders who never did get lucky.
  22.  
  23. (from “Animal Farm 2”, forever hidden in a virtual drawer)

© Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. Caprice: collaborations: collected, uncollected, & new. Little Rock, AR: Sibling Rivalry Press (2015).

About the Poet:

Denise Duhamel, United States, (b. 1960) is a poet and educator. Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University. Citing Dylan Thomas and Kathleen Spivack as early influences, Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual and ephemeral.

Maureen Seaton, United States, (b. 1947) is an LGBTQ poet, activist, and educator. She teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Using collage techniques to create delight and dissonance, Seaton’s poetry has been described as unusual, compressed, and surrealistic.

Duhamel and Seaton have successfully explored the possibilities of collaboration throughout their careers, writing such collections as: Caprice (1993), Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000), Little Novels (2002) and Smile! (2015). [DES-11/19]

Additional information:

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.