damn straight

~ A verbatim scene from tonight's library shift ~

A Girl I Vaguely Know: Hey, you working tonight?
Me: Yup.
AGIVK: All the college computers are being really gay.
Me: They're being really what?
AGIVK: Really gay.
Me: *pointed eyebrow raise*
AGIVK: Oh! Sorry, sorry. They're being really stupid. Sorry.

That's right, my eyebrows have the power to shame people out of offensive language. If only it worked on everyone.

we wade through blood / for our sleeping girls

I thought I'd take advantage of the when you see this, post a poem in your journal meme, which has been floating half-heartedly around my flist recently, to talk about Carol Ann Duffy, who is the UK's current (and first female, and first openly gay) Poet Laureate. I first heard about her tangentally in a post of foreverdirt's, and looked her up on Wikipedia, and then liked the sound of her so much that I went and borrowed a couple of slim poetry collections of hers from the uni library.

And so I whole-heartedly and without reservation recommend The World's Wife, a collection of thirty-something poems about the women passed over, ignored, unwritten and unrecognised by history & myth. I think this is something relevant to many of our interests, perhaps? Anyway, it's very sly and often funny and sometimes heartbreaking, and Duffy can do things with language that make me want to howl with envy. Some of the poems are short and pointed (Mrs Charles Darwin, Mrs Icarus) and others are longer. When naming my favourite I'm torn between Queen Herod and the one I'm going to post now; it's the first in the book and, it's easy to tell, the most personal.


Little Red-Cap

At childhood's end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

( He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud )