Judith Pacht’s book of collected poems, Summer Hunger, will be published by Tebot Bach in October, 2010. Her chapbooks, User’s Guide, 2009, and St. Louis Suite, 2010, were published by Finishing Line Press. Her manuscript Vectors was a finalist for the 2008 Philip Levine Prize and the Tupelo Press open submission competition. Pacht won Honorable Mention in the 2007 Robert Frost Award and the 2007 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry competitions. She was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society, Edgar Bowers competition.
A two-time Pushcart nominee, her work includes poems published in Ploughshares, Runes, Phoebe, Cider Press Review and Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Lost Hills Press. 2007), The Poetry of Relationships (Canadian Federation of Poets, 2009) and The Gastronomic Reader (University of California Press). Writers at Work featured her poem, Surface, as their January, 2009 selection. Her chapbook, also her first poetry collection, Falcon (Conflux Press), was published in 2004.
Please visit her website: www.judithpacht.com
No one pulls her –
She goes willingly,
enjoys the bruises
on her upper arm
under the blue shirt,
reveres his mind,
the smile, the tongue
that reels off history:
Plutarch’s Advice
to Married Couples,
Constantine’s Sword.
The show of intellect
turns her on, She’ll promise
anything when he talks
mean or smart, scares her
on the Autostrade swerving
through a soggy stretch
locals call the Styx.
She lives with hell
and likes it,
his three-headed habits
dropping clothing everywhere,
stacking dirty dishes with the clean,
She won’t reveal the third.
Meanwhile
he comes and goes
no questions asked,
which works for her
as long as she can take
the ride – oh, how she loves
the ride – from Vicenza
along the river
to see the villas
of Palladio,
as long as she can
suck the sweet-tart juice
of pomegranate seeds.
Poetry in this post: © Judith Pacht
Published with the permission of Judith Pacht