Formerly Communist Love Sonnet

By Connie Deanovich b. 1960 Connie Deanovich

The Chinese concubine feeling has left and the

sky hovers like the preparation of a revolutionary speech.

You, my long walk with all that expectation

the sexy lunches, thousands of them,

and then all that religion of eroticism.

Beneath the squeeze on my heart is a stranglehold.

You, like a little Italian porcelain village that’s all over the

shop window saying admire this image of foreverness.

The red scarf is factory-made but silky

and it’s what I’d flutter over your face if you were here

and it would be cheap greasy hypnotism, my own malarkey

and we’d be on the southside, at the boat docks, and

I’d kiss you beside the stretch of a Russian grain ship, its

hammer and sickle like the sending out of rescue choppers.

Source: Zombie Jet (Zoland Books, 1999)

Biography

Poet Connie Deanovich grew up in Chicago, and earned a BA at Columbia College Chicago and an MA at DePaul University.

Influenced by Ted Berrigan and Gertrude Stein, Deanovich composes playful yet formally ambitious elegiac poems that engage themes of connection, sexuality, and time. In an interview with the blog Here Comes Everybody, Deanovich, asked how she would explain what a poem is to a seven-year-old, replied, “I would . . .

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