Patti Smith, 1976 This photo, black-and-white, where Mapplethorpe portrays his dark-mopped ex in profile, seated nude on wooden floorboards, knees drawn up against her breasts to hide her nipples, heated by the sideways radiator pipes on which she rests her palms, her bulging ribs a set of parallel oblique gray stripes rippling her bare white skin, unsmiling lips a short flat line-- these were my first parameters, my inspirations, when I learned to write. On Patti’s ribs, the wooden flooring’s planks, the stacked pale pipes, I modeled my pentameters. The aim: amid such sharp lines, to be frank and raw, yet still control what sees the light. Jenna Le This poem was inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph, Patti Smith, 1976. Click here to see it. Jenna Le is the author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), which won second Place in the Elgin Awards, and Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Rattle, and West Branch.
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February 2025
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