A Terrible June

Padraig Regan

Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorsewould turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so muchof their coconut aroma, their slick & electric yellow? On the radio a tenor is bouncinghis voice around Purcell’s baroque arpeggios & this is the fourth clear dayin a row & that strong light is throwing shadows over the ground like gothic script.I’ve been walking around the city being beautiful & I have photographsto prove it (I’ve learned, recently, to make myself beautiful by a certain sweep of the fringe, orforcing a correspondence between my nails & my lips by bringing each to the same pitch of red).To think I’ll have to go home later & try to sleep while my skin hums with all the heatit’s absorbed these hours spent marveling at everyone’s tulips—their heads are like little novas! Often I envy the Scandinavians for their months of sun,unpunctuated. I think I want some kind of salad. I want to feel like a real boy, sometimes.

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Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

Virginia Quarterly Review

Winter 2018

Charlottesville, Virginia

University of Virginia

Editor
Paul Reyes

Publisher & Executive Editor
Allison Wright

Poetry Editor
Gregory Pardlo

From its inception in prohibition, through depression and war, in prosperity and peace, the Virginia Quarterly Review has been a haven—and home—for the best essayists, fiction writers, and poets, seeking contributors from every section of the United States and abroad. It has not limited itself to any special field. No topic has been alien: literary, public affairs, the arts, history, the economy. If it could be approached through essay or discussion, poetry or prose, VQR has covered it.

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