APOLOGIA
Adrian Blevins

As for love I’m in favor  
but how to say it is frankly  
the hindrance if you were  
an unfeigned monkey as a girl  
or a wind-up toy monkey
or a just a honey monkey  
stupid on the back of a bike.   
A monkey in a school play  
on monkeys! A monkey  
with a monkey for a heart  
watching Jane Fonda & Jane
Seymour & Jane Goodall
on TV to learn the basics  
such as how to kiss & dress  
& who to moon for or dupe  
& ditch & block or shut in  
& asphyxiate. About love  
I am saying there should have been  
in those mountains a Cherokee  
with clichéd feathers for a hat  
& a series of instructions  
made of hand waves & smoke  
& little hearts & arrows  
drawn in the dirt meaning  
touch here & here & good  
& go while above the feathers  
flit fairies like in Disney  
& Shakespeare & fireflies  
like in real life in summer  
in Virginia with their heat  
all over the whole situation
like love’s a bang or a kiln  
& not this other nighttime  
repentance thing in January in Maine  
so tongue-tied & faraway.

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Adrian Blevins is the author of Live from the Homesick Jamboree, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, two chapbooks, and a collection of essays she edited with Karen McElmurray—Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. "Apologia" is from her newest book, Appalachians Run Amok (winner of the Wilder Series Book Prize), which will be available from Two Sylvias Press later this month. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including a Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award, and, more recently, a Pushcart prize, a Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and a Zone 3 Poetry Award. New poems have been recently published in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and other magazines. Blevins's work is also being included in Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, just out from Texas Review Press.