Riehlife Poem-of-the-Day: “Hide & Sex,” by Catherine Rankovic

I met Catherine Rankovic through a women’s poetry gathering known as “Loosely Identified,” or “Looslies,” or simply (in a hurry) “L.I.” She’s a bang-up poet, author, editor, teacher, and facilitator. Read more about Catherine’s career as a word woman after her witty, insightful poem, “Hide & Sex.”

HIDE & SEX

Let us play Hide & Sex.
You hide out in the world and I
will find you for sex. It
could take decades because I can have sex
with only you. With no one else. Five billion
people on earth and we each get only one
truly sanctioned chance. Everything else
there are laws against. These are the rules:
It must be you. You are “the one.”
If I find you I must buy a white dress.
We must meet at a place which will grant excuses.
There will be a permanent record of our pairing.
After that the sex must be provided or it’s no fair.

______________________
Catherine Rankovic, Poet, Author, Teacher

Catherine Rankovic left a career as a print journalist to study literature and earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry writing from Washington University, where she has taught creative writing since 1989. She is the author of Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis (Penultimate Press, 2010), a collection of interviews with prominent St. Louis poets and authors, and of Island Universe: Essays and Entertainments (2007), and Fierce Consent and Other Poems (2005). Her poems have appeared in River Styx, Boulevard, Criminal Class, MARGIE, and other journals, and will appear in the forthcoming issue of Umbrella and St. Louis Anthology of Verse.