A River Sings | 09 11 22 | Andrena Zawinski

Negative Pleasure

This is a poem that bumps into you 
in the dark, doesn’t excuse itself,
makes you want to dust yourself off, 
straighten up, move along, as if
nothing ever happened. This poem
offers no apology for the discomfort
it causes, continues to stumble drunken 
on its own discontent, lumbers along 
all the jagged edges, unsettling under
thunderous skies, leaden footed
sinking into quicksand with teeth. 
This poem has lost its place. This poem 
is reductive. It is nothing. It is lost, locked 
in a room without windows or doors.

—Submitted on 02/16/2021

Andrena Zawinski is the author of Landings (Kelsay Books, 2017). Previous books include Something About (Blue Light Press, 2009) and Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Press, 1995). She edited Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2012). She is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com and founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.