Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Woman
after Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
“A loud intruder,” griped the grouchy rat.
“A bold cross-dresser,” marveled the cravat.
“A timid blushing thing,” the pink dress said.
“Her gaze burns,” sniffed the letter left unread.
“Undignified,” the balled-up hanky frowned.
“A menace,” moaned the specs, smashed on the ground.
“How dare she touch me!” snarled the hat. “Absurd!”
“She’s rather nice,” the pocket-watch demurred.
“Poor body! She’s half-starved,” the cream cake tutted.
“And yet she’s puffed with pride,” the desk rebutted.
“Her conscience is her guide,” the pamphlet shrugged.
The shawl: “A chillier frame I’ve never hugged.”
The last to speak, the violet, said this:
“Her slightest word’s intenser than a kiss.”
*
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in math and an M.D. and works as a physician in New York City.
