The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Macon Sex School by Marjorie Becker

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Jordi Alonso, is from The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance by Marjorie Becker, released by Tebot Bach in 2020.

The Dearest Dark

He wanted her naked as thoughts of theft,
he wanted her naked as garden light,
her flowers bursting forth, her breeze,
he wanted and waited to sing her soul,
symphonic flurry, sudden, long,
and as she somehow simmered, sighed,
and as she knew the plot, the thighs,
the under mist, the utter mist,
he sang his hope, his hail, his throng
of deepest dark, of dearest debt
of unknown pleasures ripening.

Marjorie R. Becker is a Macon, Georgia native and the author of Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (UC Press, 1996); the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz (University of New Mexico Press, 2022); and the poetry collections Body Bach (2005), Glass Piano/Piano Glass (2010,) and The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance (2020), all published by Tebot Bach.

Jordi Alonso holds degrees in English literature from Kenyon College (AB ’14) Stony Brook University (MFA ’16) and the University of Missouri (PhD ’21). He is currently a Classical Studies MA student at Columbia University. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014 and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. His work appears in Kenyon Review Online, Banyan Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Follow him on Twitter @nymphscholar or get to know his work at jordialonsopoet.com