Balanchine’s great deer park.  No longer

his or anyone else’s doe in tulle, I’ve

taken to rifling for my future under

the sofa cushions of pretended gypsies,

and it is the fifth time in thirty days

that palms like tissue have handled mine.

Let’s say I’m chasing a reprieve among

these floating heads of staid, yet un-

known men, those beaded strands that

part against my cheekbones when I shove

myself inside.  That same odor of stale

want whose fabric calls for but never

meets the day.  The trouble is, it won’t

let itself be pinned down.  Her million

cats hum while I sip on lost, un-creaking

bends, their licking tongues all garish

beside my famine’s lack of better words

than you bound to me with tape and

Backhaus clamps.  Where is my blue-

veined foot clenching in the toe box, the

zealous whip of toe to thudding hands,

flown evocation of an echoed prayer?    

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and the new managing editor of Drunken Boat.  Suzanne's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Breakwater Review, PANK, Word Riot, Spork, Sierra Nevada Review, and other journals. Suzanne also teaches composition at Hostos Community College in New York City, where she currently lives.