Just in time for St. Valentine's Day--CGP 25: Jessica Rogers' HOT WATER

CGP 25: Hot Water
by Jessica Rogers  (16 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.
SOLD OUT!

In 1979 the philosophers the Brothers Gibb noted that nobody gets too much love anymore.  Thirty-two years later their postulation seems to hold even greater validity.  Jessica Rogers tries to even the score with her expansive love poem Hot Water.  Like the love-child of Walt Whitman and Joe Brainard (& they certainly would have had one), Rogers’ poem is a brazen love letter to the world, mining memory & returning with precious jewels for everyone, all of the time.



From Hot Water
by Jessica Rogers

I loved a young man
on the subway last week;
I want to describe him.
I want to say
how he reminded me
of you,
of so many other loves

(like the way Todd says
he loves the women
who jog toward him
on bridges:
as they get closer,
you can imagine
the whole thing going down.
She would look
so beautiful,
soft
in her private moments,
so that as she jogs by,
you can’t help but tear up
to be that close to her,
having already lived and died
in your racing thoughts,
and so sigh
at some memory,
and turn to look
with relief—at least
you didn’t share any names).

But then
my stranger
got off the subway
and I loathed him for it,
and missed him a little bit—
his reading a book,
shirt half tucked
(just like a real relationship,
Brooklyn-bound).