Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

By Olivia Clare b. 1982 Olivia Clare
Women asleep. Carlight,
east red and west white.

Women, and men made of them,
and lambs in their droves, and power lines east

to the women-made men and women of men,
when a man is a sum
of what women he knows, and I

blurred my vision till I
saw a woman and lambs in the streets,
west red and white east,

and I wanted to eat. Women and men,
don’t fear me, I am
a hand come to wake her. Red

in the west says
woman is man is woman is man.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

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This poem originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Poetry magazine

November 2011

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Olivia Clare

Biography

Olivia Clare was born in New York in 1982 and raised in Louisiana. She earned a BA in English from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in Southern Review, London Magazine, Poetry, FIELD, and other journals. She was the 2008-2009 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She is also working on a collection of short stories.
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Poems by Olivia Clare

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Relationships, Men & Women

POET’S REGION U.S., Southern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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