Deborah Garrison
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A Working Girl Can't Win
8 editions
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published
1998
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The Second Child: Poems
6 editions
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published
2007
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ワーキングガールは浮かばれない
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Deborah Garrison / A Working Girl Can't Win and Other Poems First Edition 1998
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Open City 6: The Only Woman He Ever Left
by
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published
1998
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“Lately I can't help wanting us
to be like other people.
For example, if I were a smoker,
you'd lift a match to the cigarette
just as I put it between my lips.
It's never been like that
between us: none of that
easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic
flares. Everything between us
had to be learned.
Saturday finds me brooding
behind my book, all my fantasies
of seduction run up
against the rocks.
Tell me again
why you don't like
sex in the afternoon?
No, don't tell me--
I'll never understand you
never understand us, America's strangest
loving couple: they never
drink a bottle of wine together
and rarely look at each other.
Into each other's eyes, I mean.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
to be like other people.
For example, if I were a smoker,
you'd lift a match to the cigarette
just as I put it between my lips.
It's never been like that
between us: none of that
easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic
flares. Everything between us
had to be learned.
Saturday finds me brooding
behind my book, all my fantasies
of seduction run up
against the rocks.
Tell me again
why you don't like
sex in the afternoon?
No, don't tell me--
I'll never understand you
never understand us, America's strangest
loving couple: they never
drink a bottle of wine together
and rarely look at each other.
Into each other's eyes, I mean.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
“For you she learned to wear a short black slip
and red lipstick,
how to order a glass of red wine
and finish it. She learned to reach out
as if to touch your arm and then not
touch it, changing the subject.
Didn't you think, she'd begin, or
Weren't you sorry. . . .
To call your best friends
by their schoolboy names
and give them kisses good-bye,
to look away when they say
Your wife! So your confidence grows.
She doesn't ask what you want
because she knows.
Isn't that what you think?
When actually she was only waiting
to be told Take off your dress---
to be stunned, and then do this,
never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:
in one motion up, over, and gone,
the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,
her face flashing away from you in the fabric
so that you couldn't say if she was
appearing or disappearing.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
and red lipstick,
how to order a glass of red wine
and finish it. She learned to reach out
as if to touch your arm and then not
touch it, changing the subject.
Didn't you think, she'd begin, or
Weren't you sorry. . . .
To call your best friends
by their schoolboy names
and give them kisses good-bye,
to look away when they say
Your wife! So your confidence grows.
She doesn't ask what you want
because she knows.
Isn't that what you think?
When actually she was only waiting
to be told Take off your dress---
to be stunned, and then do this,
never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:
in one motion up, over, and gone,
the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,
her face flashing away from you in the fabric
so that you couldn't say if she was
appearing or disappearing.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
“Used to be he
was my heart's desire.
His forthright gaze,
his expert hands:
I'd lie on the couch with my eyes
closed just thinking about it.
Never about the fact
that everything changes,
that even this,
my best passion,
would not be immune.
No, I would bask on in an
eternal daydream of the hands
finding me, the gaze like a winding
stair coaxing me down. . . .
Until I caught a glimpse
of something in the mirror:
silly girl in her lingerie,
dancing with the furniture--
a hot little bundle, flush with
cliches. Into that pair
of too-bright eyes I looked
and saw myself. And something else:
he would never look that way.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
was my heart's desire.
His forthright gaze,
his expert hands:
I'd lie on the couch with my eyes
closed just thinking about it.
Never about the fact
that everything changes,
that even this,
my best passion,
would not be immune.
No, I would bask on in an
eternal daydream of the hands
finding me, the gaze like a winding
stair coaxing me down. . . .
Until I caught a glimpse
of something in the mirror:
silly girl in her lingerie,
dancing with the furniture--
a hot little bundle, flush with
cliches. Into that pair
of too-bright eyes I looked
and saw myself. And something else:
he would never look that way.”
― A Working Girl Can't Win
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