ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANNE WHITEHOUSE's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Ploughshares, the New England Review, and other publications. She has received the Hackney Literary Award, the Mademoiselle poetry prize, and the Joan Gray Untermeyer Poetry Award (from Radcliffe College).

Les Fleurs du Mal

By Anne Whitehouse


I am trapped in a car
with my bickering family,
hurtling down familiar roads
with no way out.

 

Against a background music
of argument and complaint,
my mother ridicules my father,
my father builds up steam.

 

It’s only a matter of time
until he explodes
and she retaliates—
their orgasm of sorts.

 

I tune them out
with a language
they can’t understand,
repeating Baudelaire’s verses
until I know them by heart.

 

Visions of voluptuous evil,
grandeur and decay,
capture and comfort me
from my ordinary evil.



Published October 2008