Letter from Eloise Dated July 18

When I studied poetry I studied Archilochus, and I made love to my professors

there were whores and wine, and a spear to rest on, songs for the pit and the gutter  

there wasn’t much love in him, but that’s okay—there was more than enough in me.

There was a lot of love in Sappho—that was too much for me—and so I chose Archilochus

but in between them was laid bare the field where poetry stood between love and death. 

Then I left academia, and I was poor, very poor, so I made love my profession, 

yet what entered my life was rather Dirt, and her twin sister Cleanliness—the obsessive

with her endless work of waiting, of making a home for when her love will visit and rest.

Here was, for me, a new dimension to the world which was neither love nor death 

the endless work of those who serve men, the men too busy to be serving others

with the showers, then the epilation, exfoliation, and then the thorough moisturizing, 

in preparation for my body to be gushed into by the riches of young and old alike.

There isn’t much money to be made with just love as a sport and a pastime. 

Though not mine anymore, it is of others, the young others, those with no worries

aside from war and money, which exist only to spoil love, and by spoiling, preserving, 

and I’m a girl who needs to be spoiled—nobody can doubt the words of my ad.

Without love and without lust, I’m the Lady Macbeth of the Liberty Suite at the Standard 

stained and caged, an animal scrubbing and rubbing the spots off my credit. 

Between the hours I returned to Archilochus, to his poetry of hollow and vital things, 

the dead parched by the sun, and the insurmountable stench of death

perfume being the essence of war and love, of bodies thrusting against bodies 

which enters first through the nostrils, and then come the screams, the pleading, 

the crying, the tears our world is awash in, and regret hiding on the tip of another’s blade

piercing the hymen of a boil, extruding reddish pus, wet and pale like a child of dirt.

Please forgive, forgive my bitterness, forgive my exhausted limbs, my tired fingers

through which life seems to slip so fast, and like a dog in pain I can only bite back.