The Recluse › Issue 15

Eileen Myles

PIGS

It is the first
day of the new
Year. The city honors
This day by not
Requiring us
To move our
Cars. I ran down
In flip flops
Then I looked
At the app
And discovered this
Fact. I sd
Hi to my neighbor
and stumbled
Up the stairs. Are you okay
she said. Yes
I said but I felt
Not ashamed but mussed
Rattled. I started reading the
New Yorker
Which seems so
In between
I said so on Twitter
And one woman started flirting
With me. I had showed
My address in a photo
Of the magazine
& it sounded like
She would be right
Over. I said I had six
Kids & my husband
Was a brute. My friend
In Chicago laughed.

Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker, and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their twenty books include evolution (poems), Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for You, I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they’ll be teaching at NYU and Naropa University and they live in New York and Marfa, TX.