Kathleen McClung

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From Your Lips to God’s Ears

I wish I hadn’t slept with them.
Substantial, brash, they left me torn.
Disco dress code: high heels, short hem.
I wish I hadn’t slept with them.
A wiser woman’s stratagem:
take earrings off after they’re worn.
I wish I hadn’t slept with them,
substantial, brash. They left lobes torn.

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Kathleen McClung is the author of Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, Almost the Rowboat, and A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear in Mezzo Cammin; Southwest Review; Atlanta Review; Spillway; The MacGuffin; A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens; Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace; and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust Poetry Prizes. McClung serves as 2021-2023 guest editor of The MacGuffin, sponsor-judge of the sonnet category of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition, and reviewer for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries. She teaches writing and literature classes at Skyline College and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. She lives in San Francisco. www.kathleenmcclung.com