American Life in Poetry: Column 059 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her life as serendipitous, yet she doesn't shy away from acknowledging loneliness. At Twenty-Eight It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don't care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can. "At Twenty-Eight" by Amy Fleury is reprinted from "Beautiful Trouble," Southern Illinois University Press, 2004, by permission of the author. The poem was originally published in Southern Poetry Review, Volume 41:2, Fall/Winter 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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