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The Professor

By Joshua Mehigan b. 1969 Joshua Mehigan

I get there early and I find a chair.

I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod.

I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod

and second an opinion I don’t share.

I think: whatever else I am, I’m there.

Afterwards, I escape across the quad

into fresh air, alone again, thank god.

Nobody cares. They’re quite right not to care.

I can’t go home. Even my family

is thoroughly contemptuous of me.

I look bad. I’m exactly how I look.

These days I never read, but no one does,

and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was.

Everything I know is from a book.

Source: Poetry (October 2012).

Biography

Poet Joshua Mehigan grew up in upstate New York and received a BA from Purchase College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Influenced by the poetry of Philip Larkin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Bowers, Mehigan writes intelligent, morally complex lyric poems shaped by a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter. Critic Adam Kirsch praised The Optimist in a review for the New York Sun, observing, “Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in . . .

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