Your Suitors
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This poem emerged from a relationship I had two decades ago with a strikingly attractive person. Whenever we entered a room together, I noticed how eyes and faces would gradually turn toward her, drawn by the desire for a moment of her attention or simply to be in proximity with this beauty. It was new to me, and dreamlike. It was hard not to think of all the cumulative attention, throughout the day, as somehow organized, or scheduled, following a form I couldn’t quite discern.
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John Wall Barger is the author of six collections of poems and a book of essays on poetics and film, The Elephant of Silence (LSU Press, 2024). He’s a contract editor for Frontenac House, lives in Vermont, and lectures at Dartmouth College.
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