I like this poem. It’s from a book called Sure Signs.

Selecting a Reader

by Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,

and walking carefully up on my poetry

at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,

her hair still damp at the neck

from washing it. She should be wearing

a raincoat, an old one, dirty

from not having money enough for the cleaners.

She will take out her glasses, and there

in the bookstore, she will thumb

over my poems, then put the book back

up on its shelf. She will say to herself,

“For that kind of money, I can get

my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

“They had my mouth all stretched open, and my lips were cracking, so they kept putting Vaseline on, but it would dry out and get all stiff. They would just slap more on, like everywhere, without looking where they were putting it. I was laying there thinking, this is basically my personal hell, my mouth stretched open and my lips cracking as strangers apply Vaseline without discretion all over my face.”

Whoa. Has anyone read this month’s issue of GQ? I’m referring specifically to “The Forbidden Word,” which is ostensibly an article about the devastating affect of the word “cunt” on the female psyche. In actuality, it’s this amazing outline of the author’s own insecurities about his virility, and his open rage at the feminist movement. It’s super creepy and seriously fascinating in a “how is this a cover story in a mainstream publication” sort of way.

Also GQ has it listed in the Advice section. Sweet! Check out this solid “advice,” fellas:

“When I find myself cornered by a woman, my very masculinity in jeopardy, there is something more important than love: making her feel filthy and subhuman.”

“Use it and you have every right to fear a call to the police within five minutes. ‘That’s it,’ you can imagine your partner saying. ‘I’m packing my stuff and going to a shelter.’ Even worse, most shelters would probably take her.”

“Maybe men should be grateful for this word, still capable in a way that nothing else is of turning back the social clock to a time when women’s self-esteem didn’t impinge on ours.”

“Back in the ’70s when I was young and feminism was a strange new force in my tiny Minnesota town, I remember my sense of puniness and dread as one by one of my buddies’ mothers became aware of their talents and potential and started doing things like taking night classes in Journal Writing and Sketching the Male Nude. Houses that had been spick -and-span for years suddenly languished, with toys all over the living room and half-eaten TV dinners in the trash cans. Something big was happening. Big and bad.”

“‘You shouldn’t roll over like that,’ my buddy said.

‘I know. I know’

‘They don’t respect it,’ he said.

I asked him what they did respect.

‘When you call them a selfish cunt,’ he replied.

That night, my relationships with women changed.”