Villanelle for Louise Bourgeois by Jenna Le

The Runaway Girl by Louise Bourgeois, 1938.

Villanelle for Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

    I was a runaway girl who turned out alright.
        -Louise Bourgeois

I was a runaway girl who turned out alright.
All the algebraists who hump the pillars of the Sorbonne
couldn’t stop me from running nude into the New York City night.

The tapestries of centuries past, their unicorns and wights,
couldn’t trip up my running shoes: I could not choose but run.
I was a runaway girl who turned out alright.

My father mended rugs for money; he ate my nanny’s rug for spite.
To flee the prick of his unicorn horn, I married young:
with my bridegroom, I fled nude into the New York City night.

If I’d had to, I would’ve gladly made a solo flight
à la Amelia Earhart; I’m used to doing things alone.
I was a runaway girl who turned out alright--

Look at me now, surrounded by Manhattan’s neon lights!
What a palace this place is! Who truly needs the sun
when they’re running nude in the blue New York City night?

Never mind how lonely I get amid these steel-girt heights,
or the guilt I feel when I recall the war-torn France I shunned.
I was a runaway girl who turned out alright,
running, running nude into the New York City night.

Jenna Le



Previously published in Jenna Le's book, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011).

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), which was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller, and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (forthcoming from Anchor and Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her website is http://jennalewriting.com/ .