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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
GETTING A PURCHASE, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: Whoring? I guess I thought it was part Last Line: I can send a small check from time to time. Subject(s): Love; Prostitution; Thailand; Harlots; Whores; Brothels | |||
Whoring? I guess I thought it was part of the adventure, that I was smart to get sex, interpreter, companion in one package, but by increments of mornings this brown face has grown dear upon my pillow. Across the jittering spoons on the dining car table, I watch her laugh at jokes in her comic book as we ride north to trek the hills. She won't like that, thinks walking's for the poor, for farmers, and now she's a city lady who taxis, paints her fingernails. Her father's a farmer. He sold first her sister, then her, to a man from Bangkok when the droughts came. The two support ten who, in good years, gather in the rice sheaves, but never enough to buy back even one. I paid the bar a month's fee. We went to Koh Samui. Scared, she walked the beach but wouldn't go into the sea above her knees unless I held her. We took the shells she'd chosen in the sand and presents from Bangkok to the farm. The family was polite but formal like a nineteenth-century crew lined up to meet the captain's wife, who brought aboard bad luck. She's taught me Thailand, given me a purchase on the culture, until she and the country have become a chord in memory, not separate notes. That body, each breast sweet as brown domes of the raw sugar sold in the market, has the softness of soil clouding round the plow in paddy water. Two weeks, then I go back to work, to college. I bought her a diaphragm, urged the pill - her sister's on her third abortion. Maybe I can send a small check from time to time. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...LOVING YOU IN FLEMISH by LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR A MAN AND WOMAN ABSOLUTELY WHITE by ANDRE BRETON AFTER THREE PHOTOGRAPHS OF BRASSAI by NORMAN DUBIE THE VIOLENT SPACE by ETHERIDGE KNIGHT AN OLD WHOREHOUSE by MARY OLIVER CHICAGO CABARET by KENNETH REXROTH FOR A MASSEUSE AND PROSTITUTE by KENNETH REXROTH |
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