[R. S. Gwynn]

Meter's a bit rough, but so is Donne's.

POEMS OCTOBER 24, 2016 ISSUE
ITCH
By Alan Jenkins

AUDIO: Read by the author.
(The Flea’s Retort)

It must have been their first time—first shared bed,
A hotel off 42nd Street, so sleazy
It had seen stuff that made cockroaches queasy
And even the rats had learned to give head.
But these two were so young, so innocent,
They thought the footsteps that came and went
All night in the corridor, with whispers, meant
Someone was sick, or dead; and so they hid
Their guilty fears by doing what they did,
Three times, then fell asleep. That’s when I fed.

Not the kind of place you lie around
And wait for room service in the morning,
Rich on coffee smells. As day was dawning
They scratched their itch again; untangled, found
They were soon scratching at a different one
And this time the scratching was no fun—
In the struggle for survival, I had won
A little victory . . . Inflamed in parts
They’d barely known, with murder in their hearts
They hunted me; but I had gone to ground.

If words could kill me, I would not be here
To tell the tale—they raged, they spat blood libels
On my kind, they hurled their Gideon’s Bibles
At specks their maddened vision made appear
On sheets and tiles in that unhappy room.
Did they think it might have been their tomb?—
In a time of plague, the telltale bloom
Of red pinpricks, two bloodstreams joined as one,
Two lifelines cut off in a storm of fear
Before their years of bed-hopping had begun!

***************************************

But why not "A 42nd Street hotel, so sleazy"?

[Mike Alexander]

I liked the piece. My wife did not.
(Not because of the bugs. No, she hated that it went for humor rather than building on the darker feelings.)
I found it stranger, though, that the issue didn't include any biographical note on the poet. They did for the other poet, as they usually do.

We wondered whether Jenkins was a pseudonym until I wiki'd him, to find that he's a well-established Brit. I just happened to know less of his work than I ought.

[Michael Juster]

Deputy Editor (& poetry editor) of the Times Literary Supplement, if I'm not mistaken.

[Charlie Southerland]

Incest is just so incestuous.

[Brian Roy]

Mike, for a reason I can't figure out, the New Yorker poet bios have become erratic over the last year or so, in that some issues run no bios for either poet. Other issues, like 11/7, run a bio for one poet ("Adrienne Su") but not the other ("Ocean Vuong"). Likewise, the 10/24 issue has a bio for one poet but not the other. I don't usually like the poetry they publish so I don't pay a lot of attention to the poet bios, but it seems to have happened sometime in 2015 or 2014.

[Michael Juster]

I just usually read online and don't check the bios, so I am sorry that I can't be helpful.