Rebecca Seiferle is the author of four poetry collections, including Wild Tongue, which received the 2008 Grub Street National Book Prize in Poetry; Bitters, awarded the Pushcart Prize; and The Music We Dance To, which won the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers’ Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the National Writers’ Union Prize. Seiferle lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she teaches in the English and fine arts departments.

Photograph by Melissa Buckheit.

Wild Tongue

by Rebecca Seiferle
The Platonic idea is “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God . . . a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on.”

—Bertrand Russell


We’re not all lesbians at this bar and grill (not yet?
not practicing? only in heart?), chiaroscuro as the room is
with expensive ambiance and dear cuts of meat
and fish overlaid with nouveau fruit sauce, it’s clear
that the most manly woman among us, older,
wearing cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo,
is probably neither entirely straight nor wholly
queer. When she begins to confess her ‘secret’—

People on couch
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