POEM OF THE MONTH
May
Ars Poetica
Longue by Derek Mueller
Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash
lounging in your maroon dress at the end of my sentence—
your sweaty hand reaching out into the silence, always
sipping on the hush of a lover who swears off erotic
pleasure—the split between poplar & tree—the pressure
to live off the surface of your cold, cold knees. Because
my loaded, rupturing heart sinks down in reflection pools
at the center of that old cemetery—now, bird sanctuary.
Come with me & whisper conspiratorially—the only
way I know how—to the red cardinals writing poetry
on the burial site of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—
he has rested long enough—so long we have arrived
at that terrible precipice, again. Say we live in his death
box with the third wall cut out like a diorama, & we are
made of clay—remade by something traceable—not dust
but the curvature of your pursed lips. You are the line I
hold in my chest with too much certainty—I cannot
release you without this pause about how I am angry
with the gentleness of your teeth—the stinger to your
bee—boomerang of history—O, how we threw it—
throw it all back to the sky—
Katherine Irajpanah is a writer and political scientist who recently received her Ph.D. from Harvard's Government Department. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Colorado Review, Peripheries, Driftwood Press, and the Harvard Graduate Review. She is originally from Santa Monica, California.
While reflecting on the art of poetry, I found myself returning to one of the most iconic (and seductive) forms of punctuation found in poems—the em dash. From Emily Dickinson to Danez Smith, poets turn to the em dash as an instrument for regulating time and motion on the page. It is the conductor's baton, bridging while separating and lingering while propelling. The poem inhabits the baton to understand the music itself.
A poem about poems feels incomplete without calling back to the deep historical lineage of poets and poetry. The poem includes "Easter eggs" for readers of Dickinson, Vallejo, and Yeats. I most explicitly note Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the very first poet I read in school. For this occasion, I visited Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where Longfellow is buried, for inspiration.
We received almost 600 poems this month and I realized that ars poetica is a slippery form—it risks self-indulgence, abstraction, or the worst sin of all: cleverness without heat. But this poem? This poem burns. I love "Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash" for how it reimagines the em dash not just as a punctuation mark, but as a character, a seductress, a hinge, a wound. From the opening line (“lounging in your maroon dress at the end of my sentence—”) we know we’re in for a charged, theatrical meditation on language, desire, history, and time.
What stuns me most is how the poem layers lineage (Longfellow! Dickinson! Yeats!) with lust, grief, and poetic theory—and still lands with its feet dirty in the real, the bodily. The dash becomes everything: caesura and seduction, fracture and continuation. “You are the line I / hold in my chest with too much certainty” — my god. That’s ars poetica! That’s also love. And obsession. And art-making.
This poem screams that form isn’t just structure—it’s personality. It’s sex. It’s memory. It’s survival. And if you're lucky, it’s also a red cardinal whispering poetry over the grave of your first favorite poet.
.png)
.png)
