Virginia Chase Sutton

Perfection

We are all beautiful at seventeen,

our flawless skins attached to willing

bones and sinews. Some of us are

waiting for our chance, for someone

to say, let’s make out like a couple

of teenagers, or the stranger with

a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine

he will share though you are underage.

Or the joint passing around the room,

making you happily relaxed in the

front-closing lace bra you are willing

to shed for the unknown, the chance

at real love, not what you left behind

at home, your father missing you,

smoking cigarette after cigarette.

You do not know yet how lovely you are

with soft brown hair and blue eyes

flecked with squiggles. And though

your body is not like the striking grace

of cheerleaders back home, it stuns

with dazzling breasts and big areoles

that men will kiss and love. You will

learn of this loveliness even as you scorn

those who are not worthy. Later, your friends

will grow into their flesh as you grow

away, already ahead, open and waiting,

discovering a taste for a certain sort of man.

He is the one who will hurt you

with his attention/inattention, leaving

you alone some weekends when you

want his body and crazy kisses. What

he suggests you do over and over, though

you have performed for your father

for years. It is all new, this perfection,

a body that happily does as you bid,

no thought or chance of illness, destruction

or loss. Love your gorgeousness.

It will not come again---this purity of spirit,

this holiness, this beam and shine

beacons from your eyes, your eyes.

Virginia Chase Sutton's second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, has been reissued as a free ebook by Doubleback Books. Embellishments is her first book and Of a Transient Nature is her third. Down River is her chapbook. Seven times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, QU, Mom Egg Review, The Laurel Review, and The Comstock Review, among many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. Sutton's poems have won a poetry scholarship to Bread Loaf, the National Poet Hunt, the Allen Ginsberg Award, and the Paumanock Visiting Writer's Award and Reading Series. She has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Writers at Work. Awards include three times from Poets & Writers, Arizona Humanities Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and many others. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.