Poem of the Week

Getting Back Together

Keetje Kuipers

We sat around unpacking boxes. I had a baby

on the way, and the new nursery was still full of past lives

carefully wrapped in paper and taped shut. My family

had come down to help, and you were somewhere

miles away, as you had been for years, the two of us

clumsily circling the future like two kites getting

tangled up the same tree. But then Aunt Jean bent over

to root through the bubble wrap, her fingers twisting

in studded pleather straps, a muttered What’s this?

before triumphantly pulling it out: our old strap-on,

the blue dildo we’d taken to bed a decade earlier, purchased

from some old queen, probably not actually old, probably

younger than we are now, who’d lounged behind

the counter of a Philadelphia sex shop with pink hair

and an understanding smile. And I won’t say

that was the moment my heart tipped back toward you—

we both know it took much longer—only that I began

then to sense the ways I might still be changed.

The Yale Review · "Getting Back Together" by Keetje Kuipers

What surprised you about the composition of this poem?

I often feel flummoxed by the complicated narratives and identities present in the material that I make my poems from. As a writer who pulls generously from the autobiographical in order to construct my poems, I constantly suffer from the push-pull battle of the factual truth against the poetic impulse. Stealing shamelessly from Richard Hugo’s old maxim, I’m fond of telling my students that they owe the truth nothing, that it’s the emotional truth that counts. And yet in my own poems, I struggle to negotiate the complicated truths of my story—my bisexuality, choosing to become a single-mother-by-choice, marrying my old college girlfriend after a seven-year breakup—with the emotions that have fed and been fed by those truths. This poem surprised me in that it’s one of the few where I decided to let the autobiographical details stand instead of eliding them in pursuit of a more streamlined lyricism. What surprised me the most is that honoring those complications actually worked.

Keetje Kuipers is the author, most recently, of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times as well as in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She lives in Montana and is the editor of Poetry Northwest.