I CAN’T STOP LOVING YOU JOHN KEATS
by Kim Addonizio

Even though you’ve been dead for almost two hundred years, I feel like
maybe
I could fall through a wormhole or get knocked on the head or go through
some stones in Scotland

& somehow make my way to you, wearing a complicated bonnet of feathers
& ribbons
with medicines sewn into my pantaloons under my white muslin dress

You’d fall for me & forget about Fanny Brawne & the big difference in our
ages, because
well, because that’s what I want to happen, John Keats, not the part where
your brother

grows pale & mist-rising-from-a-shorn-field-under-a-sky-of-whirling-
swallows-thin & yes I’m sorry dies
but the part where we lie on the grass & drink French wine & you lay your
head on my breast

I can feel your eyelashes against my skin even here in the twenty-first
century
like the legs of a fly as it lands on a musk-rose while a tiny chorus hymns
around your head

That’s how much I fancy you, John Keats, like you’re an Amazon
fulfillment center far out in space
& I have a Groupon code for an intergalactic shopping spree

like you’re the star of a miniseries about a Romantic poet unsullied by
mycobacteria
& I’m a woman from the future changing literary history forever

writing your name in my diary while you steer our little boat out of Lethe
& into the lilies
trailing my hand in the canonical water

Please take me away in my tight corset & wedding dress of sand
I don’t want to stay in this world watching Truth bound & gagged on the
railroad tracks

feeling like a fish trapped in a European pedicure spa while the tiny,
whining violins of privilege play
& Beauty slowly backs away

Kim Addonizio, “I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats” from Now We’re Getting Somewhere Published by W.W. Norton and used by permission of Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. (buy now)

In 1841, on this day, the first detective story was published. In his story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe (books by this author) created mystery's first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. The story introduced many of the elements of mysteries that are still popular today: the genius detective, the not-so-smart sidekick, the plodding policeman, and the use of the red herring to lead readers off the track.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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