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    Desire Museum
    Desire Museum
    Desire Museum
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Desire Museum

    By Danielle Cadena Deulen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied. 

    Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women’s lives. In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go.

    In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: “I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateOct 10, 2023
    ISBN9781960145017
    Desire Museum

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      Book preview

      Desire Museum - Danielle Cadena Deulen

      Cover: Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen

      DESIRE MUSEUM

      Danielle Cadena Deulen

      American Poets Continuum Series, No. 203

      BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2023

      Copyright © 2023 by Danielle Cadena Deulen

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      First Edition

      22 23 24 25 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

      Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 109 for special individual acknowledgments.

      Cover Design: Sandy Knight

      Cover Art: Frederick Sandys, Medea

      Interior Design and Composition: Michelle Dashevsky

      BOA Logo: Mirko

      BOA Editions books are available electronically through BookShare, an online distributor offering Large-Print, Braille, Multimedia Audio Book, and Dyslexic formats, as well as through e-readers that feature text to speech capabilities.

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

      The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

      —Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

      This is our city with the bridge in flames, call it Desire.

      This is our mountain, hear its umber harness shiver, call it Time.

      —Juan Felipe Herrera, We Are All Saying the Same Thing

      CONTENTS

      1

      Desire

      Self-Doubt with Invisible Tiger

      Remix with a Few Lines from Hopkins

      Another Romance

      Gaslight

      Reasonable Doubt

      The Uncertainty Principle

      A Woman Asleep

      A Series Person

      Cow

      The Hunters

      Reversal

      2

      Dear Aphrodite

      Self-Doubt with Crucifix

      Remix with a Few Lines from Crane

      Two Loves, Both Ending Badly

      The Sirens

      Lost Sapphics

      Aura

      Lost Derby in Sapphics

      I Consider Your Silence

      Lost Self in Sapphics

      Translation

      Lost Letter in Sapphics

      Postscript

      3

      Lake Box

      Self-Doubt with Trapeze

      Remix with a Few Lines from Keats

      Texas Sestina

      Test Site

      Vanished Cities

      We Grow Apart

      Because No One Answered the First Call

      The Earth Will Not Save Us

      Uninhabitable Planet

      Aphelion

      4

      Inner City

      Self-Doubt with Dead Lupine

      Remix with a Few Lines from Lorca

      Why I Left, Why I Returned

      Afterlife

      Invoice

      Museum

      Stalemate

      Recovery

      Accord

      Call

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Colophon

      1

      DESIRE

      I don’t know if the fox was a dream

      or memory: the flash of orange-red

      slipping up the sandy bank with ease

      as if its slender feet might find purchase

      in the erosion of shoreline, stepping

      onto the sand as it fell, gravity and light

      turning solid, static beneath her feet.

      Up, up—surely this is a dream, the dense

      bodies of pine, the scent of those bodies

      heavy, glistening, pulled from a waking

      moment of my life, but inflected here:

      I always wanted to catch a fox. So, a desire

      dream. The sky sunning and raining both

      at once: a fox wedding, I’ve heard it called—

      a way to confuse humans away from their

      rites, so they might not be caught together.

      No priest or parish, they mate for life. As in,

      monogamous. As in, a structure we never tried,

      though we often hid from other humans,

      went off together to enact our ritual of love.

      My dream-fox is alone, perhaps a runaway

      bride, or perhaps there was never a wedding,

      though she still might have allied her heart

      to another, confused by his signals, foxes

      famously silent, speaking only through scent,

      through movement. In this vision, I point

      at the fox, saying, stupidly, Fox! to my son

      (who is not yours), who is too young to

      know this is rare, his face only mirroring

      my surprise. He asks, What’s a fox? As she

      pauses briefly at the top of the bank to look

      back, make certain we can’t follow.

      I stumble toward her, sinking too deeply

      in sand to pull up my step before she

      dissolves into a thicket of thorns. My son

      stands on the shifting bank near the water

      that is too clear to be water, almost starshine

      or ether floating on a thin surface of smooth

      stones—smoke over your breathing body,

      your cigarette burning orange-red in the room

      we returned to, never spoke of. I’m standing

      naked near the window, trying to silhouette

      myself in your mind,

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