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.® |