By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem treats intimacy as something humiliating and completing at once, moving from bodily return to degradation and wholeness.
Its compact argument turns love into a scene of exposure: the speaker imagines hatred and love as equally degrading forms of entry into another person's world. The final question makes the source of wholeness uncertain, split between kiss, strand, emptiness, and lack.
Titled 'Slighted,' the poem stages intimacy as degradation that doubles as completion: 'it is better to hate her / before you love her,' and 'Which ever comes first / will certainly be degrading.' The 'soap opria queen' on her set leaves only the question of whether 'the kiss,' not 'the strand / or empty hole,' is what 'makes you whole.'