“the vast majority of us were off somewhere with someone in a dark corner doing godknowswhat”

As teenagers, our first encounters with poetry had profound impact. While editing Please Excuse This Poem, an anthology of contemporary poetry curated with young adults in mind, we were constantly reminded of the power of poetry to change, enrich, or even save lives.

Here are four poems from the collection, along with the poets talking about what inspired their work.

—Brett Fletcher Lauer & Lynn Melnick, Editors, Please Excuse This Poem

Joseph Massey

Anchoritic

Listening to wind
dislodge objects
in the dark around
my room, I want
to think thinking
is enough to locate
a world, but it isn’t.
It isn’t this one.
It isn’t this world,
weather.

I wrote "Anchoritic" on a winter night, during the rainy season, on the coast of Humboldt County, California, where I lived for twelve years in a small cottage — so small you could feel the wind moving it. The place would shake. The storms were fierce that year. 

I was reading a lot of William Bronk at the time — a touchstone poet for me — and the echo of his voice is there, a kind of duet with the weather.

• •

Joseph Massey is the author of Illocality (forthcoming from Wave Books), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and many other books. He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

Erika Meitner

Sex Ed

The back seat of his car glows blue
in the classroom darkness. The filmstrip
is chattering steadily through its loops, teeth
holding it to the light. We’re slumped
in our seats, legs stretched in the aisles—
unwieldy, bursting packages of spandex,
watermelon lip gloss, hard-ons,
torn jeans, acne scars, unlaced sneakers.
The guy with the car, bad 70’s hair
and a varsity jacket is kissing a girl now,
one hand grasping her waist, the other
roaming her buttoned blouse trying
to convince her to go all the way—
But it feels so good, baby,
how can it be bad?

The film bleeps suddenly, freezes
in mid-convince—the signal
for classroom discussion, all of us sitting
uncomfortably silent, no one wanting
to be the prude or the slut, the scapegoat
for Mrs. Callaghan’s lesson on negative
peer pressure or abstinence or whatever
was chalked on the board today
to teach us sex as danger, sex as fear
of consequence, sex as weak-willed passion
gone too far; sex as anything but get-lost-in-it
pleasure, ephemeral treasure-chest
of orgasm, a word Mrs. Callaghan
has managed to avoid all semester—
somehow more uncomfortable
than menstruation or nocturnal emission,
penetration or intercourse.

Who decided to leave the most intricate union
of flesh and emotion to health class, to 30 kids
playing Frisbee with sample diaphragms, batting condoms
from row to row like balloons? We are at risk. We are
self-conscious. We don’t need this moral guidance, this
just say no public health awareness training, but sex ed
is not an elective. We have no choice,
so we become a captive audience
to latex AIDS prevention, the horrors
of teen pregnancy and early responsibility.

We cart eggs around for a week
and try not to break them.
We take pop quizzes on STD transmission.
We are compulsory in our hormones.
We are standardized in our knowledge.
We work hard on weekends to master
drinking in backyards, smoking blunts in parks,
making out in bathrooms. We get on our knees
to study toilets, torque, touch, taste, zippers,
hangovers, the elaborate instructions that come
in tampon boxes, condom boxes, home
pregnancy test kits. Drugstore clerks
become our examiners, our worst after-school
nightmares in price checks of K-Y Jelly or Trojans
camouflaged carefully under Seventeen magazines
and double A Walkman batteries.
In unofficial night classes we promote
promiscuity, teach each other
gutter words, trade misguided tips
on broken hymens, blue balls, the precise
definition of third base, how to
find a clitoris or get rid of house party
hickeys quickly.

Someone needs to raise their hand immediately
and volunteer to tell the girl in the car
to unbutton her blouse for that guy slowly.
Someone needs to show him how to caress
her eyelids with his thumbs, then run one
over her lips, see if she takes his finger
into her mouth and sucks, then turns her head
to the side so his moist thumb trails her cheek.

Someone needs to remind them, in the silence
of the beep—the longest hanging moment ever—
that we don’t need to ask forgiveness for exploring fingers,
roving lips and tangled limbs, for baseball metaphors
and base desires, for holding each other close
in darkness. The force that drives all flesh
exhausts, exalts, raises us up ecstatic.

I went to high school in a New York City suburb during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 1980’s, and our high school health classes were shockingly thorough when it came to running us through the mechanics and potential consequences of sex, as well as the intricacies of various methods of contraception. This was a good thing, as it turned out the vast majority of us were off somewhere with someone in a dark corner doing godknowswhat. I wrote “Sex Ed” as a meditation on that time, in that class, with all those movies and all those strangers. In the US right now, only 22 states and DC require public schools to teach sex education; only 19 of these require that the information provided to students be medically accurate. Which is to say the poem I’d write today would be a rallying cry for more sex education—not an ode to pleasure in the face of fear—though I do still believe that pleasure should absolutely trump fear whenever possible.

• •

Erika Meitner is the author of four books of poems, including Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. She is currently the 2014-15 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is also an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

Metta Sáma

Impenetrable, porous

When I was a kid I discovered sex was about how far a boy could throw
           a felled tree, how long two people could stare at each other instead of rain,
                        how hard it is to remove mud from hair and handprints
                                   from thighs.

Because the first penis I ever saw belonged to a boy who used knives
            as language, because that boy was my brother, because the boy
                       was my brother whose words were serrated, because he lived
beneath

                                   me, his wrists pulsing into the ceiling, listening for my heart
to cease being a haven, I began pressing my lips against any boy’s body
           who was strong enough to throw me. I was convinced that breasts were missiles,                       exploding boys until their gestures
transformed love to pain

before sex, pain with sex, sex of threat and secret. Because I discovered
           the stains of sex live under the skin’s pores, in the pegs of teeth
                       and tastebuds, because I learned early that girls who stroked

                                   cigarettes were afraid and lonely, because whiskey burning
my tonsils made me remember my brother’s saliva would always coat
           my throat, I don’t remember the first boy I gave away a kiss to,

                       the first boy I slammed against my parent’s kitchen door,
                                   or the first boy who slammed me against the rough edges
of a tree. I don’t remember when I first allowed a boy to treat
           me like a dagger, or the first time I discovered that crying

                        in the rain underneath a boy you don’t love or won’t remember                                    isn’t the fastest route to god, to heaven or the torments of
truth.

There are two personal life events that left me terribly traumatized – one at the age of 8, one 11 years later; one, the death of innocence, of my body & the other, the death of the dearest friend I had – each event I have tried to excise from my brain my spirit my heart, sometimes through writing, mostly through spiritual practices; the more I try to rid myself of these pasts, the more they press into me. Writing about them, however, at least gives me the feeling, the belief, that I have not experienced deaths and dying alone, that there are many many others who, too, are dying to live.

• •

Metta Sáma is author of Nocturne Trio and South of Here (published under Lydia Melvin). Her poems, fiction, creative non-fiction, & book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, bluestem, Drunken Boat, Esque, hercricle, Jubilat, Kweli, The Owls, Pebble Lake Review, Pyrta, Reverie, Sententia, Vinyl, among others. Metta lives & works in Winston-Salem, Northcackalacka.

Sandra Simonds

Golden Buddha

I’m going to tell you a sonnet and it’s going to go by fast, so
    you’re going to have to listen. It will have a moral. It’ll be tight
      like a haiku. It will take place when I’m in twelfth grade and I’m going
        to be the main character. It is 1994. In this sonnet I will
            slip Chinese menus on people’s doorknobs
      with red and blue rubber bands in Manhattan Beach, California
at the same time I imagine my classmates are slipping on condoms
    to prevent themselves from making more of themselves.
      This is what I do every day after school to help out my family.
This sonnet sincerely hopes you understand that even though
        it’s about class and poverty and giving my mom an extra $75 a week
and all of that important stuff, it’s also about how this work,
walking from pink house to yellow house to gray house gave me beautifully
      sculpted calf muscles as well as the ability to write this sonnet.

This sonnet is about feelings of duty and responsibility for one’s family at a young age. It imagines what might be stereotypical depicted as adolescent behavior (in movies, books, popular culture) as being sexual experimentation and it contrasts this with my actual experience of having to work in high school to help support my mother, who was a single parent. I wanted the sonnet to reach out to other young people who might find themselves in similar situations but who never see their situations reflected in anything that they read or watch on TV. In a sense, the sonnet works to reveal the hidden but common world of urban material struggles. It’s the handshake of survival in 14 lines. 

• •

Sandra Simonds is an assistant professor of English at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. She is the author of four collections of poetry including The Sonnets, Mother Was a Tragic Girl and Warsaw Bikini. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review and elsewhere.