Brittany Perham, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize

Double Portrait

• All those times I said “forever”
• as in, “Will you love me forever?”

• then waited for you to say,
• “Yes, I will love you forever,”

• while you drained your glass and said
• instead, “There is no forever,”

• if in a bad mood or, if good,

• “You’ll be asking me about forever forever,”

• (grammatically suggesting, “until we die,”
• the happy equivalent of forever),

• I swiveled my stool, I drank my wine;
• I knew I’d be doing this forever

• come hell or high water,

• come a future minus you or forever,

• and it began to snow on the football fields
• on the TV screens, forever

• a comfort in the comforting bars
• that have been around forever,

• playing fields for every lover
• whose question about forever

• her lover can never answer
• even if he tries forever,

• even if he tells her, in his own words,
• the perfect line ending in “forever,”

• because the question she’s asking
 she’s asking
• herself: “Will I love you forever?”

• I drain my glass.

• The answer could be yes.

Double Portrait

• When you’re dad-close
• I can smell your liver

• You build the house
• From the inside out

• Standing on the airy platform
• With a nail in your dad-teeth

• Hammer hammer
• It’s working isn’t it

• I’ll make a telephone
• With bean cans and string

• Hammer hello-o

• Your dad-eye watery close

• To the first wall’s last nail

• It’s as far down to the ground

• As I’ve ever seen
• Without a railing

• and when you’re dad-close
• I’ll stay with you girl-close

• I’ll girl-stay without falling failing until
• You’re on the ground or in it

Double Portrait

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (forthcoming from W.W. Norton, 2017), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press, 2016). She is a Jones lecturer in the creative writing program at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner fellow. She lives in San Francisco.