Teri Ellen Cross Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Mignonette Dooley

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Bad Girls Album Cover

 

By the time I was seven, I knew I would like sex, knew

I would be good at it. I practiced lying on my back,

 

knees bent, hairless prepubescent folds angled up to the air.

I knew nothing of actual sex. The only penis I had ever seen

 

was by accident—opening the bathroom door on my father’s

friend. But this was the time of Donna Summer. Under a

 

streetlamp’s maraschino cherry glow, she posed—wet black

ringlets framed her light brown-sugared face, pouting lips

 

slick in shiny scarlet gloss, high heel perched on the lamp’s base

plunging the slit of her dress back to reveal a black lace stocking

 

a garter as garnish—so naughty, so beautiful. Why wouldn’t I

want to be like her—up front about being wanted?    

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Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019  Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

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Comments

[Indran]

Strong poem, direct, delightful

[Jack Skelley]

Good poem! Good album too !

[Don Berger]

Really good song, this one, from its colossal opening to the rush of the final phrase, with a fine scene built of striking pictures as it moves forward. High art.

[gracecavalieri]

what a marvelous delightful sweet innocent naughty-- up front poem! I love it!

[Clarinda]

I remember that photo! I had only bodice rippers to emulate way back when but I too knew at 7 I wanted to be that kind of Bad Girl. “Thanks for the memory….”

[lally]

perfectly wrought poem, thank you for writing it teri, and thank you for posting it terry

[Terence Winch]

Michael: Glad you liked it.

[Earle Hitchner]

As an undergraduate college student who spun records for fraternity and sorority dances during the early disco era, I remember the BAD GIRLS LP cover very well, and Teri Ellen Cross Davis’s ekphrastic poem makes it all the more vivid in my mind. Her curiosity about sex at age seven in a way dovetails with what disco was meant to do: get people excited. For many, dancing was a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. And the unwritten rule was: no dance, no chance. Both women and men wanted to be wanted, but men’s open-chest flammable shirts and flared pants were no match for the ladies who looked Donna Summer-sultry on the dance floor. This sharply observed verse uses the alluring “bad girls” look of Donna Summer’s album cover art to tap into the simmer of Davis’s own sexual awakening. What a thoroughly engaging and rewarding tour de force her six couplets are.

[Peter Kearney]

Funny, just the other day I read something about the pouting lips and sexual display as covering a smoldering anger at having to act that way. It's good to get a different point of view, so engagingly expressed.