A Poem to my Deadbeat Daddies

In a conference room full of anarchist queers

And three generations of feminists

It is asked of me:

“How do you find literary inspiration

in such chauvinistic, sexist men

such as the beat poets?”

I am suddenly naked in the school showers

Blood swirling the drain,

Covering the bruises in clothing,

Walking to my car in the parking lot,

Where I will find

The word “dyke” keyed

Deep into the paint of my car door

In a few short years—

The Midwest will become bearable

as the youth gentrify our small river town

With exposed brick and Edison bulbs

I will fuck the quarterback’s girlfriend

Sneak in underage to the only gay bar in

a hundred-mile radius

and stand awe-stricken on the streets of

Boystown as gay marriage is legalized,

just days before Chicago’s pride parade.

But until then—

there is solace in their words:

Chapbooks of poetry hidden

on the bottom shelf

in the local bookstore

Like porn for rent behind

the blue curtains in Family Video

Daddy Whitman

Daddy Ginsberg

Daddy Burroughs

Dirty daddy Bukowski

I don’t know what that says about me

The fact that my literary father figures are all men

Despite my obvious afflictions

Or that they’re mostly sexual fucking deviants

Ginsberg is eating a “cock and balls sandwich” with Kerouac in Nirvana

Burroughs is puppeteering his ghost in Tangiers

Trying to figure out how to

Acquire blow and phantom sex at the same time

Bukowski says that you must fuck

a lot of beautiful women

and drink a lot of beer to be a good writer

I have nearly drowned myself in women and beer and still

I am endlessly fascinated by their ars poetica poems

The poems about writing poetry telling poets how to be better poets

Sweet Billy Collins tells you to clean your dirty fucking house

The jungle of pizza boxes, towering piles of books, and prowling cats

are not conducive to creativity

But I have pressed flowers and cigarettes

into the pages like religious atonements

Circled and underlined their words

Picked them apart like dissertations

I have tattooed my skin with the quotes

Whispered the poems between my lover’s thighs

Practiced my best monotone male voice in the mirror

I can do one hell of a beatnik voice

But I have to remind myself that I am a woman

A woman with tell-tale daddy issues, no doubt

But I would not have been a beatnik—

I also would not be able to yell the word “cunt”

In a poem

At an academic conference

or compare my lover’s vagina to a

Halloween store burning down on Christmas

if it were not for my deadbeat daddies

Receiving shock treatment in the asylums

for their deviant sexual practices

Appearing before the Supreme Court

for the literary merit of the word “cock”

Fighting the fascists that are rhyme and meter

and roaming the streets with typewriter arthritic

hands and opiate induced brains

No, I would not have been a beatnik

But I also would not be a journalist,

an openly queer poet,

or a transplanted English scholar

without them—you see

We cannot just stop reading

literature because of problematic authorship:

The key to being a good poet

is to just keep fucking writing