Poet Maggie Millner

It is no surprise that the three poets whose readings I most liked at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival Poetry Stage were all women. They represented three different life paths which, while typically feminine, were universal in their humanity.

The first is Maggie Millner, born in upstate New York, an instructor in writing at Yale University. The poem is from her poetry collection entitled Couplets.

1.12

There are many ways, of course,
of telling it. But each account obscures

some other version equally true.
One is that I lied to everyone I knew.

Another—this one I really do believe—
is that for years I loved him more than me.

I can conjure even now our first apartment’s tile:
white diamonds in their blue argyle

frieze around the sink, the dirty grout
I’d scour with a toothbrush while he was out

at work. I can count four bathmats
over eight years, hear the record player catch

every time we stood up from the table.
And I can still feel the invisible

moat we both lived in, on the other side of which
we knew lay torment, exile, wreckage,

the anarchy of singledom. Loss upon loss.
I remember testing it, the moat: throwing across

a rope to check its breadth, twice to the waist
wading in before retreating, shamefaced,

reining myself back. To him it was a sea
I think entirely impassable. To me

it was a dizzying ravine
that circled us for years, then cut between.