Attention

By Rae Armantrout b. 1947 Rae Armantrout

Ventriloquy

is the mother tongue.

Can you colonize rejection

by phrasing your request,

“Me want?”

Song: “I’m not a baby.

Wa, Wa, Wa.

I’m not a baby.

Wa, Wa, Wa.

I’m crazy

like you.”

The “you”

in the heart of

molecule and ridicule.

Marks resembling

the holes

in dead leaves

define the thing (moth wing).

That flutter

of indifference,

feigned?

But if lapses

are the dens

strategy aims

to conceal,

then you don’t know

what you’re asking.

Source: Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)

Biography

Rae Armantrout, one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, stands apart from other Language poets in her lyrical voice and her commitment to the interior and the domestic. Her short-lined poems are often concerned with dismantling conventions of memory, pop culture, science, and mothering, and these unsparing interrogations are often streaked with wit. “You can hold the various elements of my poems in . . .

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