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Cocktail Dress

My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
If you’re looking up
from the street,
I am right behind
the left breast,
shameless as a blood fluke.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening
& I raise the window
to listen to it
crackle & hum.

Prompted by this photo, which was also the image used for Read Write Poem’s first ecard contest.

This entry was posted Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Poems & poem-like things.  Print

2 Responses to “Cocktail Dress”

1. robin andrea says:

   November 18, 2009 at 9:55 pm

   That hawk can’t believe it’s invisible. But the truth about breasts in red dresses cannot be denied.

   Reply
   • Dave says:

     November 18, 2009 at 10:00 pm

     Unfortunately, another re-write (#4) since you left that comment removed the hawk even farther from the picture. (I decided to go back to my usual pattern of leaving almost everything unsaid. Plus, human blood flukes are tragically underexposed in lyric poetry, and I’m trying to redress that balance.)

     Reply

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This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

   

 

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    But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
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