Home > Poetry Magazine > Eros of Heroines

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Eros of Heroines

By Ange Mlinko Ange Mlinko

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge

and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch,

no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange

drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch.

Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan

As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated.

He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin

the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto

while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings

are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument

of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings,

subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green.

Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst

I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking

swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem

when a small daughter disappears with a wife,

morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori.

Jacqueline Lamba + Andr� Breton

Ange Mlinko, “Eros of Heroines,” from Poetry (February 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ange Mlinko.

Source: Poetry (February 2007).

Biography

Ange Mlinko is the author of three books, Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010), Starred Wire (Coffee House Press, 2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and Matinees (Zoland Books, 1999). In 2009, she won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. Mlinko was born in Philadelphia, and has worked in Brooklyn, Providence, Boston, and Morocco. She has taught poetry at . . .

Continue reading this biography