Sheryl St. Germain
Sheryl St. Germain’s most recent book is Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, and her collection of lyric essays Navigating Disaster is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University. A native of New Orleans, she says her favorite place in the world is the Atchafalaya Swamp in south Louisiana.
— From January 2012A Country Where You Once Lived
It starts when you’re thirteen, and those tight shorts make your crotch wet when you ride your bike. You like these shorts, the way they make you feel this new way: sexy. You fall asleep at night thinking about sex. You listen to songs that encourage you to think about sex, and you discover you can even think about it at church and in the classroom without anyone knowing, if you keep a certain demeanor and cross your legs a certain way.
January 2012