The Literary Review of Canada

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This Poem was published in the January/February 2008 Issue

Requiem to a Marriage

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Myna Wallin is a poet, prose writer, editor and host of In Other Words on CKLN 88.1 FM, where she interviews authors from across Canada. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Thousand Profane Pieces, was published by Tightrope Books in 2006. She also co-hosts the Art Bar Poetry Reading Series, co-organizes the Toronto Small Press Book Fair and has recently become poetry editor of Tightrope Books. She is reading Susan Swan’s What Casanova Told Me and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel: The Restored Edition.

Lead with what you know:
Sex, then. It’s always been
my strong suit.
I could make a man feel
like an electric current was
blazing through him.
I know; I’ve seen that amazed
look many times.
Their appetite for me
was so strong —
I thought fire
leapt from my pupils.
I had a tiny mole
to the left of my lips, my pout,
and it garnered a disproportionate
amount of attention.
Marry me, doll?
His laconic style won me over.
I would always eschew the fast
and spurious talkers.
But I was never a bargain,
and my appetite for material things —
like a gyroscope oscillating —
defied all laws of gravitational pull.
My lust for those comforts,
in the end, exceeded his lust for me.
As a consequence, neither one of us
got what we wanted.

Read more from the January/February 2008 Issue, including all related letters.