From Ploughshares 38.2-3 (2012). 137-140.
RALPH JAMES SAVARESE
She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I’d gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I’d submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn’t pray. The monk was me, and the poem, of course, was awful. But because I seemed to know something about formal poetry and because she herself was obsessed with God (the thing my speaker should have been obsessed with), she decided, I guess, to let me in.
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