Verse Wisconsin 105| Melissa Lindstrum

Two Poems

You Said a Girl in a Blue Dress

Since we last spoke, I’ve had, more or less,
three blue dresses. Isn’t that what you told me
you wanted, a girl in a blue dress?

I didn’t think of you when I bought them, I confess.
Though I’ve imagined wearing them in fantasies
I’ve had since we last spoke. More or less,

they’re all the same shade, though my chest
is exposed in the first, the second has straps like spaghetti,
and even if you do want a girl in a blue dress,

it’s unlikely the soft silk of the third will impress
you, nor will any color or anything sexy
I’ve worn since we last spoke. More is less,

if I mean the more we were together, the less
we cared about each other. Wouldn’t you agree?
Do you want a girl in a blue dress

or is this something I imagined for you, to press
you finally into loving me fairly?
That was the last time we spoke, more or less,
when you wanted me, in and out of my blue dress.

A Sestina For You There, In Your New Time Zone

You know, they have earth-
quakes in California. You may hold a pen
to script your apologies, but watch
me throw it down an earthquake crevice when you
mutter again that I am a black
spot on your soul. I want a tattoo on my ring

finger that says Never. Ring-
lets of amaryllis linking the letters or another earthy
something uniting the classy black
calligraphy. If it seems I have pent-
up rage, it started the day you
cleaned your ear with my bobby pin. I watched,

horrified, hating you. I watched
you pick out the wax, wipe it on your sleeve, ring
my hair around your thumb, put the pin back. You
like the West Coast, but no place on earth
would ever like you. I wish I’d loved you in pen-
cil, that I could turn you over, erase the black

lead. Do you always blackmail
your lovers? Do you always check your watch
so matter-of-factly? I have a penchant
for second, third chances, though had I the knack to ring
out witty retorts, I’d tell you this old earth
has its bump-in-the-road days, but you

are worse than road kill, you
who have never braked on the one blacktop
road in our hometown, your earth-
toned ties flapping flippant in the car. Watch:
look closely while I paint a bright ring
of forgiveness and then step outside of it. If there is pen-

ance here for me, I’ll bet you couldn’t pen
it out worth a damn. I’d had hopes for you,
but no matter. Anyhow, don’t bother to wring
the life out of me anymore. Blackball
that urge to fly here, or to watch
through my window as I undress, unearth

my penitent bones, and finally remove my black
mascara. I’d like to ring up Christ himself, make him watch
you steal my prayers from this swivel chair you call earth.

—Melissa Lindstrum, Madison, WI

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Melissa Lindstrum

Melissa Lindstrum was born in Milwaukee and lived there most of her life. Though she’s spent the last four years in other time zones, she is back in Wisconsin, working and eating lots of cheese in Madison.

About "You Said a Girl in a Blue Dress": This poem actually started as a non-form poem, but when I noticed how often the phrase “blue dress” came up, I wondered if it might work as a villanelle. I’ve always admired the way well-written villanelles can repeat lines without making the poem seem redundant, the way each line is instead made fresh with the repetition. Since the emotion of this poem is so poignant, I thought it a good idea to emphasize the speaker’s obsession with the blue dress and with her own resignation from—or refusal of—this relationship.

Once I decided to make it a villanelle, I experimented a lot with the first and third lines, since I knew I’d be repeating those over and over again. I think the lines I’ve chosen to repeat achieve the freshness I wanted with each repetition—they propel the poem forward through the speaker’s blue-dress obsession.

At times it was difficult to make the repeated lines make sense, and it often made me want to give up the idea of the form. But after several revisions—and after taking some liberties in changing the order of the words in the repeated lines—I found the form freeing rather than restricting. Finally I got the poem where I wanted it. And now I can’t imagine it existing outside of the villanelle form.

About "A Sestina For You There, In Your New Time Zone": This poem was one of the most fun I’ve ever written. I have always thought of sestinas as a more serious kind of poem—and therefore, I’ve always found them a little inaccessible and somewhat annoying in their repetition. But I wanted to try to get past that—and to really understand the purpose of those repeated end words.

So this poem was always a sestina in my head. It took a long time to work out some of the kinks I had with clarity and with language concision. At times I was trying so hard to get the repeated words in that I lapsed on my economy of language and some of the lines were twice (or even three times) as long as they are now. After the first few drafts of this sestina, I had to take a five-month break just to digest the form. When I came back to it (and with some helpful edits from writer pals), I was able to cut into those long lines to make them more precise. I also took some liberties in embedding the repeated words in other words (for example, "black" and "blackball"). I even found myself changing whole lines because suddenly the context was clearer to me. I think sometimes we need these kinds of breaks to let our poems simmer and then see them with fresh eyes.

In the end, though, I like what this form let me do with the language. Namely, that it pushed me to think of multiple uses and contexts for the repeated words so that each repetition felt new to me. And hopefully to my readers.