George Bilgere

Say My Name

Beyoncé's singing,
And what's strange about that
Is, first of all, I somehow know who Beyoncé is,
And second, the voice I'm hearing
Is coming from the earbuds of an iPod
Plugged into a kid sitting about thirty feet from me
On the fourth floor of the library
On a humid summer night,
The buzz of cicadas outside
Sounding weirdly like the buzz
Coming from his head — and third,
I know exactly what he's reading, because
I assigned it to him. It's the immortal
Paradise Lost, by John Milton,
And it's very long and very hard
And it's a terrible thing to be reading
Late in the summer, time running short,
Life running out, the moon
Throbbing just above the trees
And somewhere out there a woman
Is leaning against the fender of a car,
Waiting for you to shift her
Transmission into submission, and God knows
I don't blame this kid for blowing out his ears
At an early age, as Adam and Eve
Stand there stunned in the garden,
Stupidly covering their crotches, as if
That would do any good, as if it would stop
Beyoncé, dark serpent, from reminding
This nice Catholic boy in his brand new
Tommy Hilfiger muscle shirt,
With his fresh, 'round-the-biceps badass
Barbed wire tattoo, that in this
Fallen world he's never,
Never, evah gonna get his
Smooth white hands on what they burn for.

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George Bilgere is the author of The Good Kiss, which won the University of Akron Press Poetry Prize in 2001. His new book, Haywire, won the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Prize, and will appear in summer of 2006 from the Utah State University Press. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.