PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Sally Van Doren

Sally Van Doren
USA

Sally Van Doren is the author of two poetry collections, Possessive (LSU Press 2012) and Sex at Noon Taxes, (LSU Press 2008) which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her book,Promise, is forthcoming from LSU. Her poems have appeared nationally and internationally in literary journals such as: American Letters and Commentary, American Poet, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Margie, The New Republic, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Western Humanities Review. She lives in St. Louis and in New York where she teaches at the 92nd Street Y. www.sallyvandoren.com

Private Practice

My clients are syllables.
I charge them by the consonant.

When there’s an ellipsis

I slip them a cheat sheet

and we do deep breathing

until they regain their confidence.

I do pro-bono work

with aspirants. Once I lost

a villanelle to asphyxiation,

but the elegies rallied around

to help me get over it. I’m

having a long term affair

with a sonnet, but it’s strictly

confidential. I could be barred

if anyone found out. (I’ve only

told a limerick or two.) I like

to treat my haikus over sushi

and my ballads with a French

Bordeaux. I work mostly by

referral. With 26 letters out there

I had to add a secretary and a

receptionist just to keep up.

Can’t you hear their keyboards?

Tap tap tap, tap tap tap!

(First appeared in december: 26.1)

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