Michelle Noteboom won the 2006 Heartland Poetry Prize for her first book Edging (Cracked Slab Books), chosen by Ray Bianchi and William Allegrezza. Other work has appeared in Verse, Fence, Boston Review, Sentence, Columbia Poetry Review and Gargoyle, among others. She's lived mainly in Paris since 1991 where she co-curates the Ivy Writers Reading Series with Jennifer K. Dick. She works as a freelance translator in the French audiovisual industry. She also translates French poetry.
Chafed
In the stylized abstract chess I was the checkered queen.
and evening game with several. The marbled nymphs in wigs to
scandalize right through the recondite arcade, stepping to a hellish
realm of players clad in townhouse-flanked orangish art. Organs.
A heady door.
Taking a hungered lure through the techno throb-plastified feast, full
moon rising on their heels. A real princess, her bleached busted form.
Tossed round a honeyed make, I was right-fingered fashioned spread
out on the overly-bare haunches, reigning in a fleecy crop of pawns and
prize. Hardened lurid becoming. A gold-earned kiss
and entrails. . .