Wanda Phipps: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Morning Poem #27

 

I should have stayed

here with the beautiful

strong cold Corinna Mae

I should have stayed here

all those years ago

with the known and familiar

I shouldn't have called so much

I shouldn't have been so callous

I should have stuck by you

after recovery

I should have moved to DC

when you asked me to

I should have taken that editing job

I should have taken that TV PA job

I should have gone through with

that graduate school acceptance

I should have loved you

when we first met

I should have been a performance poet

a spoken word artist

I should have gone every place

I was afraid to go

I should have helped you find an apartment

I should have been more interesting

and less the clinging vine

I should have protested loudly

about some things and not at

all about others

I should have learned Spanish and German

I shouldn't have been so easily discouraged

I should have listened to my mother

my life could have been so much better by now

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Wanda Phipps is a writer/translator and author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems among others. Her poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications and has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She's curated several reading/performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and is a founding member of the theatre company Yara Arts Group.  She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Agni Journal, the National Theater Translation Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her third full-length book of original poetry, Mind Honey, was just published by Autonomedia.

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    Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning,1930.