Suffer as in allow.
List as in want.
Listless as in transcending
desire, or not rising
to greet it.
To list
is to lean,
dangerously,
to one side.
Have you forgotten?
Spent
as in exhausted.
Source: Poetry (October 2011).
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This poem originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Poetry magazine
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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