Elizabeth Marie Young
Summer 2024 | Poetry
All Manner of Maladies
We’ve made so much progress in quantum computing.
Geese fly above our house as though nothing is happening.
We suffer all manner of maladies.
Meanwhile, the ocean spreads beneath the goddamn geese
and our sex lives remain shrouded in mystery.
We don’t have enough sex.
Our sex lives are unsatisfying, according to the people who study
such things, yet our internal clocks keep ticking.
I mutate haphazardly as you dazzle me with your smile.
I want to make history but the geese are closing in.
Soon they’ll cover the lakeside in shit.
Let’s become giant teddy bears and have sex in a ball pit.
Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet and educator. She spent a decade as a professor of ancient Greek and Roman languages and literature and has published widely on the poetry and culture of ancient Rome. Her first book of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. She is also the author of a chapbook of queer, X-rated sonnets and Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity. She has been a National Poetry Series Finalist and an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Squire Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared in journals including Green Mountains Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Sugar House Review.