Traci Brimhall
I am a good student. Voted most likely to try
harder. Not voted most likely for fairytales, though I have
been both hooded and wolfed. My honors thesis on the role
of motherlessness and love hunger brought the candied
house down.
I could’ve been valedictorian if the metric
was ardor and potential for transformation. I recognize
the chemical structure of oxytocin and how to calculate
my best chance for a free drink from across the room,
and both have strong angles.
I know how it feels when that hormone unlatches
my ribs, silks my legs. I don’t confuse that with love
because in each unit of intimacy, I enter slow. Adjust
my breath. Recognize the accusations that are
confessions.
I excelled in the serious ethics of kissing, how
it makes the body more image than idea, but I admit
that sometimes I like to lick mezcal and grapefruit from
a hero’s morally ambiguous mouth. I’m sorry.
That’s how I know I’m a successful candidate.
The temptations. The failures. The ever afters of forgiveness
I have already lived. For so long I offered others the love
I wanted to receive, the cursive letters and lost slippers.
The balanced equations and checkbooks. Years of service
in the scales of care. Change my story. Accept me.
from the journal SWWIM EVERY DAY
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This poem was written—as so many of mine are—while traveling with one of my best friends, the poet Brynn Saito. While I don't remember all of the details of the prompt, the primary component was to write a poem as an application letter, and I chose to apply to Love University since getting better at love is one of the great hopes and goals of my life.

Traci Brimhall on "Admissions Essay"
Color close-up headshot of poet Diane Seuss
“I Had a Kinetic Feeling”: An Interview with Diane Seuss

"What if—I thought. What if I write a memoir in sonnets. What if the memoir is less about what happened than how I remember what happened. About the nature of memory. About the nature of thinking about memory. I am not using question marks here because they were not really questions. They were statements of intent from my brain, tucked within the jewelry box of my skull."

via TUPELO QUARTERLY
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Cover of Black Warrior Review, 48.1, where Oliver Baez Bendorf's poem was first published
What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver Baez Bendorf on "I Want Biodegradable Sex"

"I am often suggesting to students that when it comes to style, we each have a 'terroir'— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed....But the thing is that terroir is not only style. It is substance. It is not even quite right to say that it is also substance. It is exactly that, substance. It’s the matter we are made of. Terroir is what you write and how you write it. The goal is to write what only you could."
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