Double Negative

By Rochelle Hurt

mine wasn’t a pot not got: no gnat-filled grot: no pebble unturned: but you queried my quarry: how many untarpings before you: not silly to assume I wasn’t an unhot lot: not a non-grata: I wasn’t unblissed: my lips weren’t ungorgeous: but it wasn’t the right box unclosed: some hole bored of us: not long and hand-mouth trysts began: a fist can be a stopper too: an answer: knock-knock: who’s there: me, dressed in a hound’s-tooth bruise: gum-gaps as lack-clock: talk-talk: measure of nots: when it stops, the length of you: rage as distance unclosed: tied onto me: an unreminder too: how fast a not-you becomes a not-I: a knocked eye: my head notquite an unempty room: who’s not always there: not me: not without you

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Rochelle Hurt is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida, and she runs the review site The Bind.