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I Don't Know Anything About This And By The Time I Tell You It Will All Be Forgotten
Emma Wunsch
Nina is the most famous living female poet in Western New England. Early Monday, her voice gurgles when she answers the phone to a young woman who tells Nina that not only is she the most famous living female poet in Western New England, but also Stanza, the journal that has decided this, is giving her a lifetime subscription.
“For free,” the woman chirps. Her name is Abby; she’s an assistant.
“Right.” Nina has never heard of Stanza and doesn’t particularly want to receive it.
Nina holds the phone in one hand as she ties the sash of her flannel robe tight against her waist. Walking downstairs, she imagines Abby, in her early-twenties, sitting in a cluttered office in Boston or Providence. Abby, short and curvy, has dark stylishly cropped hair and tortoise-shell glasses. Tacked on the bulletin board above her desk are black-and-white postcards of Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf. There is also a postcard of PJ Harvey, but it’s color and taped.
Nina, in her early-sixties, has perfect vision and is nearly six-feet tall. Her body looks like a series of tightly connected right angles and her pin-straight gray hair hangs to the middle of her neck. Nina has published five poetry collections, and nearly every year she has at least one poem in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, or Poetry.
Nina is famous for the poem “I Don’t Know Anything About This And By The Time I Tell You It Will All Be Forgotten,” which she wrote a long time ago for Maya and Alice, her twin daughters...
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