Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day. Today we’re pleased to bring you the work of two poets, Carol Guess and Daniela Olszewska, co-authors of the forthcoming How to Feel Confident with Your Special Talents.
How to Do the Cha Cha
Stay alert in red rolling light. Focus premium-like in 4/4 time. Go into debt with arms held in minor jezebel pose. Small sidestep about the star specks on the floor. Chin up during the landside. Sexy bend, sexy bend! Practice—
Perfect understanding of where your partner is coming from. Your partner is coming from the same revolutionary party you came from. Don’t go about this the wrong way again. Or the next gala will find you cowering under a punch bowl, strained cheek rogued up in—
Panic-rose.
Boys and girls in panic rows. Roadkill of the Rodeo, toeing the party line on one side of the fault line, quaking. Which side are you on, lead or follow-fallow?
Push; no, pull. Adjust your slippery straps and swaddle sandals in bandages: it’s open season on open-toed slip-ons. Lesson: don’t leave cha to chance. Change into a tux and bind yourself into a seamless Mister. Move her, Master Manipulator.
Sway the small of her back with your small, gloved hand.
Carol Guess is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and How to Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (both from Black Lawrence Press). Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com
Daniela Olszewska is the author of four collections of poetry: cloudfang : : cakedirt (Horse Less Press, 2012), True Confessions of an Escapee From The Capra Facility for Wayward Girls (Spittoon Press, 2013), Citizen J (Artifice Books, 2013), and (with Carol Guess) How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming in 2014). Her chapbook, Thirteenz, is forthcoming from NAP in the summer of 2014. She sits on Switchback Books’ Board of Directors and serves as an Associate Poetry Editor of Another Chicago Magazine. Daniela has taught composition, literature, and creative writing at state schools, community colleges, and maximum security correctional facilities. She was born in Poland and received her MFA from University of Alabama, but she self-identifies as a Chicagoan.
