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Whatever Gets You Through the Night | Sally Lipton Derringer

Nanuet, New York

· POEM PRIZE

What words do you need when you’re trying

not to drop the house on your back, your shoulders

bruised, a hard rain falling? Neil Young was on

the stereo when you swapped your innocence

for the winding road, something starting, the

damage done. And later, down by the river,

your future rose and fell with the rhythm of Dr.

King’s speech on the tape deck, a double fantasy

of black and tan, a love supreme.

Everyone smiled as Debussy played and you promised

a thing called love, the wild air pleading for

your attention, his arm holding you in place.

You can’t handle therapy: the sound of your own

voice blabbing its pathetic story. What lyrics now?

Certainly not your son’s CD of tender love songs,

his earnest voice something that shouldn’t

be betrayed. Should you put on some Miles

Davis, a little Bonnie Raitt to accompany your blue

mood, so you can wallow in the feeling of being pinned

down to this bed you’ve made, the absence

of where you were going?

*This poem was composed using the following song titles:

Whatever Gets You Through the Night — John Lennon

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall — Bob Dylan

The Long and Winding Road — the Beatles

Gonna Be Startin’ Somethin’ — the Jackson 5

The Needle and the Damage Done — Neil Young

Down by the River — Neil Young

Double Fantasy — John Lennon/Yoko Ono

Black and Tan Fantasy — Duke Ellington

A Love Supreme — John Coltrane

Thing Called Love — Bonnie Raitt

Blue Moods — Miles Davis

Sally Lipton Derringer was a manuscript finalist for the Tampa Review Prize, New Issues Prize, Poets Out Loud Prize, and a semifinalist for the Brittingham Prize. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Los Angeles Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Solstice, Nimrod, December, Journal of the American Medical Association, and others.

Sally Lipton Derringer is a three-time Musepaper Poem Prize winner!

NOVEMBER 13, 2018 / MUSEPAPER POEM PRIZE #17 / MUSIC

 

 

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