Marc Alan Di Martino

Dear Liz—

you had me at ‘Fuck and Run’, your parched voice
like husks of sweet corn under a dying
August sun—Silver Queen, the only kind—all
sturm und twang, slight lisp betraying a shyness
undercut by your half-exposed nipple on the album
jacket. You drove us wild at nineteen, tired
of guys like ourselves running everything, screaming
their emo angst in our ears. I reconnected to you
years later, having unearthed my old vinyl
from a basement in Maryland. I had to sell
most of it off, but not you. Not Guyville. It’s true.
You never matched its hard-edged brilliance,
but that was 32 years ago & we’re both older
now, you with an eclectic recording career
and me with a small handful of poetry books
both of us with a hard-on for the early Stones 

because if you don’t then
why are you reading this, as Christgau wrote—
why am I writing this?

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Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski's Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.