Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Flirtation
Such sweet nonsense,
riding the periphery. Billy
Shakespeare (at risk
of offending the court)
so toyed
with cadences and speech: Act
Four, Scene Four of Henry V—
see Pistol’s threat
to “firk” a French lieutenant.
To firk, to fuck, to flirt:
to rap or flick about, seeking
covenant,
which implies a degree
of proximity,
though understand
comes from “nter”
not the usual “under” but between—
as when caught
in a hard place,
the novelist agrees not to risk
public scrutiny,
substituting F-U-G
for that most primitive
act, to which
upon meeting him at a party
the poet scoffs,
So you’re the man who can’t spell
FUCK! Such restlessness
comes from need. Such play
in desire. Flirt is a verb,
a state of being; a noun meaning
“stroke of wit”: what are we
in the end, if not
an experiment_—_a man
who stands, framing the doorway,
mid-attempt to nail
his best friend’s wife? He is
dumbstruck
by her pupils, nipples, hips, but
in the smoke-filled margin
of that NY apartment
pretends to listen as she speaks,
nodding yes, no, yes, yes—
notice his half-ambiguous
quick-step, her intermittent
dash…in what’s unsaid
between them, the talking,
and the talking back.
Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, and Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). She is also coeditor, with Bruce Snider, of a book of essays, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). Her creative nonfiction, twice listed as “Notable” in The Best American Essays, has appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has received a Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, and other honors. She’s nonfiction editor of West Branch and a consulting editor for Acre Books. (updated 10/2024)