I’ve always wondered about the sex of the letter A.

DAY FIVE (THE SECOND TIME) BY ANN PEDONE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 115

All I heard of the conversation was

“They all said she asked for it”

The Roman Empire fell because one day all the women

stood up and said they wanted to finally experience

form as duration

As late as the eighteenth century, “cinema” could also

mean “lost girl”

Like many women who were raised in the suburbs

I’ve always wondered about the sex of the letter A

And why, whenever someone says “poet”

I always hear “third wife”?

You’ll get used to it, scream all the women at Safeway

Broken hummingbird casings

A man who complains about lack of adequate counter space

That one Rimbaud, the one about the asshole

At 53 certain parts of me have already started

to crumble before my eyes, but like all Americans, I’m still

very good at compartmentalizing everything

It’s the third Wednesday of the month

The Cartesian Self is dead and, it’s true

It’s very hard to be a monster

ANN PEDONE

I am a poet, non-fiction writer, and literary translator, the author of The Medea Notebooks and The Italian Professor’s Wife, and numerous chapbooks. My work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River, Tupelo Quarterly, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. I graduated from Bard College and have a Master’s Degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley.