Ann Fisher-Wirth
I love humor in poems when it comes from a sense of life's wackiness and plenitude, rather than from grandstanding. Who knows why, but I find it difficult to write anything even remotely funny, though I myself am pretty funny. Therefore, I'm especially happy to be included in this company.
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My Nancy Drews
It was all about Bess with her three-inch slabs of cake
and Ned of the snappy red roadster.
At the gift store in the Officers’ Club,
I’d buy Nancy Drews with my hundred-yen
allowance, and read them at the table
as my parents danced to the Army band.
Lips refulgent in Tangee Orange, pulse points
ripe with Nights of Paris, I’d raise my head
to blush at the waiter, who just might
be my future husband. That cozy, cozy
1950’s world: paper dolls and mystery books,
Army bus past fields to Sagamihara School,
then once a month at the Officer’s Club,
a cake the size of a door, and the kids
who had their birthdays were summoned
to the stage, then the Japanese soprano
spun the dancers out again where troubles
melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops.
That fervid, fervid 1950’s world: I vowed
to be a nun if I couldn’t find a boyfriend,
so I could be a Bride of Christ,
and Jesus would come have me.
Those nights I’d prop my book against my plate,
envying Nancy Ned…then eat my cake
but leave the frosting, to shape it all together—
chocolate, leaves, roses—into one big sugar mountain.
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Ann Fisher-Wirth’s third book of poems, Carta Marina, will appear from Wings Press in 2009. She is the author of Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005) and of two chapbooks—The Trinket Poems (Wind, 2003) and Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll (online, Drunken Boat, 2005). With Laura-Gray Street she is coediting Earth’s Body, an international anthology of ecopoetry in English. Her awards include a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, two Poetry Fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, seven Pushcart nominations, and a Pushcart Special Mention. She has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.