As a service to poets and their admirers, the Believer will be (very) occasionally publishing personal ads placed by poets. These ads are very real—interested parties whose descriptions match the one outlined below should email the address above. This particular ad has been designated “Manhattan-only.”

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Sometimes I look at people & think Jesus what happened here.

But I too am tragically flawed in posh isolation—am an anemic, malcontented poet who subsists on chickpeas & Diet Dr. Pepper. I studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities before receiving my BA and MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. Currently, for my sins I live in New York City where I am a writer with a new book coming out. My poems, like me, tend toward “hormonal lyricism” & chronicle a string of meaningless affairs. So far my search for a mate has been tough-love and I have simply slept my way to the middle. A 10021-shiksa, amid the vitamin-stuffed bluebloods of the Upper East Side, I still romanticize the proletariat. Am 30, have very short platinum hair, not horizontally challenged but not Giacometti-thin either. 5'05" Texan with Eskimo blood & effervescent smile. Matisse-blue eyes. Zero abortions, zero dependents & financially secure in a kind of limited way.

My favorite poet is Blake because he succeeds in simultaneously inhabiting the carnal and the spiritual, my life aim. I just don’t want to be cheated out of some fabulous dying thing. This is what I think in the throes of athletic lovemaking in a sun-shot noon or in the middle-aged night when I fake an optimism just to breathe. When it comes to being physical, I swear I have a Y chromosome, possess the sexual mores of estrous chinchillas in the remote and humorless hinterlands of Jersey City. I recharge with Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee, NPR, the Plaza’s Oak Bar, the Sunday Times. A city girl, I am two with nature… though I wish we could all just live on air like orchids. I am a serial monogamist. I abhor confrontation. I love Stevie Wonder. My favorite song line is Leonard Cohen’s: “Like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.” I believe Primo Levi had an accident. Like a Goya noon or excessive leaf drop or an intense plate of oysters connecting a figure and a background, I am always sick in love. I believe love is a series of vibrations our sadness and visions bring into relief. For example, an elderly lady in baggy hose spills grapes on a supermarket floor so— I love you: Love as a means to avoid aesthetic devastation. (Of course anything I say will be an abuse of somebody’s aesthetics.) But me I do what I please, deep in my heart I’m just this girl showing herself a pretty good time. I made a lot of this up but a lot of it is true.

 

Premillionaire seeks same. Pulse optional. No convicts, waiters. In search of post-Eisenhower realist with simian chest urges. “Gray & distinguished” preferred, the “balding, virile type,” OK, “JFK Jr.” great!—but I’m flexible. I am neither gorgeous nor linear, nor do I expect you to be. Rescue me from my Procrustean bed, trellised behind bean futures & nuclear fallout. I want to find you through skies so bright if our veins hadn’t stolen the purest blue first. Milky, as dropped aspirin in a child’s sweaty hair. Wrist-slitting stuff. Of Lithium, gross raging, the shits again: I want someone to love amidst news of child abuse and lake-effect snow. And so with the inkings of Scandinavian malaise & whatnot, we rage on as such against the dying of the light, etc. Email me at poets@believermag.com—You may hold the “retinal scanner” to my heart!