Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her previous books include Second Story, Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Queen for a Day
Selected and New Poems
By Denise Duhamel

University of Pittsburgh Press

Copyright © 2001 Denise Duhamel.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8229-5762-0

Chapter One

    Mr. Donut

They tumble from closing bars into here. Uninspired men nicknamed for their hair: Whitie, Red; the bald one, Flesh.

What a way to save to go to Europe. But that's what I'm doing, the donut waitress taking advantage of drunks. I look through the fatty blurred window, remind them often of my aspirations, drum on the countertop: I am not like them.

Red's got a novelty passport and motions me over. He thinks his finger's alluring as Cape Cod, the farthest I bet he's ever gone. "Guess where I've been?" he slurs and has me open the blue book. A rubber jack-in-the-box penis pops out.

I think of adding sugar to the diabetics' coffee when they laugh, describing their naked wives. Twenty-four hours, any day, they know here they can There's not even a lock on the Mr. Donut door, so when there's a fight on the corner, Flesh tells me to call the police from the phone in back: "If the bikers see you finking, they'll get your ass:

From behind the muffin case, the motorcycle clash looks like a home movie: skipping loops, a volume lapse as bikes are kicked over, heads smashed. The blood puddles slowly, graying. Connie strolls in, her lipstick all crazy: the fight's over her. She wants a light. I know she'll stain the rim of her cup. But they all leave big bills under the saucers, and I get to read the few quiet hours before dawn.

    Sometimes the First Boys Don't Count

Walking home through the woods from the movie at the plaza that I didn't remember minutes after it ended, an action adventure that I didn't want to see, but said yes to just in case you held my hand, and you did. Walking home by the shortcut, the path the developers made because they'd be building houses soon, we had nothing to say. It was our first date and you stopped to kiss me, the cold of the mud wetting my feet. Your tongue, like an animal's, rough and eager, through the chain link of a zoo's fence. I didn't know you, but you put your hands up my shirt like it was nothing to either of us. You cupped each of my breasts as though holding me back, or measuring me for something, then kept walking, not taking my hand anymore. Even at fifteen, I knew you were the type that after the first kindnesses, the honeymoon was over. Your face in the night was even flatter, less pronounced than it was in the light. I knew, before this, that I didn't love you or even want to talk to you the next day in school. I told my girlfriends that you weren't very smart. You took shop and fixed cars with your dad, not even the intricacies under the hood, just body work And when I went to that garage in your backyard because we were going to another movie and your mother said I should get you so we wouldn't be late, I saw calendar pages curling under a picture of a topless woman in short-shorts. She was holding a wrench to her lips. Your dad looked at me the same way you did, but that was how I wanted to be looked at then?that was how I thought it should be. You washed the grease from your hands, wiped your brow with your forearm and were ready. A few dates later I held your penis as though it were a science experiment and put it in my mouth when you asked. A kind of aspic squirted out. I swallowed like a brave girl, taking her medicine.

    Bulimia

A kiss has nothing to do with sex, she thinks. Not really. That engulfing, that trying to take all of another in for nourishment, to become one with her, to become part of her cells. The way she must have had everything she wanted in the womb, without asking. Without words, kisses have barely the slurp-sound of a man entering a woman or sliding back out?neither movement with even the warning of a bark The Greek word "boulimia," ox hunger. Petting, those kisses are called, or sometimes necking. She read this advice in a sex manual once: "Take the man's penis, slowly at first, like you are licking melting ice cream from the rim of a cone." But the gagging, the choke? a hot gulp of tea, a small chicken bone, a wad of gum grown too big. That wasn't mentioned. It's about what happens in her mouth past her teeth, where there is no more control, like a waterfall? or it being too late when the whole wedding cake is gone:

she orders one from a different bakery this time, so no one will remember her past visits and catch on. She's eating slowly at first, tonguing icing from the plastic groom's feet, the hem of the bride's gown, and those toothpick points that kept them rooted in pastry. She cuts the top tier into squares, reception-like. (The thrill she knew of a wedding this past June, stealing the white dessert into her purse, sucking the sugary blue gel from a napkin one piece was wrapped in. She was swallowing paper on her lone car ride home, through a red light, on her way to another nap from which she hoped a prince's kiss would wake her.)

The second tier in her hands, by fistfuls, desperate as the Third World child she saw on TV last week taking in gruel. Her head, light like her stomach, is pumped up with air. She can't stop. She puckers up to the sticky crumbs under her nails. Then there are the engraved Valentine candies: CRAZY, DREAM GIRL ACT NOW, YOU'RE HOT. She rips open the bag, devouring as many messages as she can at once. They all taste like chalk. She rocks back and forth. She has to loosen the string on her sweatpants, part of her trousseau. The bag of candy is emptied. The paper doily under the cake's third layer, smooth as a vacuumed ice-skating rink What has she done? In the bathroom, like what happened

to the mistakenly flushed-away bracelet, a gift from her first boyfriend?the gold clasp unhooking as she wiped herself, then, moments too late, noticing her naked wrist under the running water of the restroom sink's faucet ... She's learned it's best to wait ten minutes to make herself throw up. Digestion begins at this point, but the food hasn't gotten very far. As ingenious as the first few times she would consciously masturbate, making note of where her fingers felt best, she devises a way to vomit that only hurts for a second.

She takes off her sweatshirt and drapes it over a towel rack. Then she pokes a Q-tip on her soft palate. Keeping in mind the diagram in her voice class, the cross section of the mouth showing each parts different function, the palate?hidden and secret as a clitoris. The teacher's mentioning of its vulnerability, split-second and nonchalant like a doctor and his tongue depressor. It's a fast prayer?she kneels in front of the toilet. Her back jerks and arches the way it might if she were moving her body to meet a man's during intercourse. She wipes what has sprayed back to her chest, her throat as raw as a rape that's happened to someone else. She cleans the seat of the bowl with a rag, and cleans her teeth with a second...