Tipton Poetry Journal
Les Fleurs du Mal
Anne Whitehouse I am trapped in a car with my bickering family, hurtling down familiar roads with no way out. Against a background music of argument and complaint, my mother ridicules my father, my father builds up steam. It’s only a matter of time until he explodes and she retaliates— their orgasm of sorts. I tune them out with a language they can’t understand, repeating Baudelaire’s verses until I know them by heart. Visions of voluptuous evil, grandeur and decay, capture and comfort me from my ordinary evil.
Anne Whitehouse lives in New York City and is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, and Being Ruth Asawa. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Her poem, “Lady Bird,” won the Nathan Perry DAR 2023 “Honoring American History” poetry contest. She has lectured about Longfellow and Poe at the Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine, and Longfellow House Washington Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
42