Keetje Kuipers
I wasn’t trying to steal her boyfriend,
and he wasn’t her boyfriend anyway. Just someone
beautiful she’d slept with once. I hadn’t yet
learned the difference between a shadow cast
in the shape of my desire and the contract a body
makes with its own hunger. But I’d known beauty—
its currency, its power. So I wanted to sleep
with him, too. How I went about it wasn’t
that remarkable. I simply made myself appear
to be a thing he’d want: not me, but something
I could easily be mistaken for, like a bird, say,
pretending to be another bird. What I
craved from him was harder to cage. Beautiful,
beautiful, I’d heard people praised all my life.
Not the bird at all—just the flutter that it raised.
Who among us doesn’t carry around at least a few remembered moments that—when chanced upon by the rogue brain searching its archives—inspire in our more evolved selves a particular type of private and incendiary shame?
I wasn’t always my best self in my twenties. I was hungry all the time: for experience and pleasure and some seemingly unattainable acknowledgement of my worth. I imagine this isn’t an uncommon appetite to have when you’re young. Another word for it might even be “growth,” if growth were characterized by wreaking havoc.
Unfortunately, one of the casualties of being in thrall to our own hunger is the ability to fully see—and respect—the people around us. As one of a number of poems exploring humility in my forthcoming collection, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, I wrote this poem as an attempt to understand the propulsive emotional blindness I intermittently experienced at that time in my life: where it came from, what it cost, and how I might forgive myself for it.
Keetje Kuipers’s newest collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (forthcoming April 2025), was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and POETRY, and have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Kuipers lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is editor of Poetry Northwest.