Danielle Pafunda’s Pretty Young Thing is a sexy, darkly feminine debut wrenched by the extremes of ecstasy and illness, a story indelibly tattooed on the body and psyche of the unnamed lead character who manages to insinuate herself as the reader’s through-the-looking-glass half-sister or twin. Pretty Young Thing documents this young woman’s life in a book of hours “slit like an electric cord, splintered, and fused to the pavement,” in a voice that’s frank, demure, sweet, sultry, determined, passive, angry, and resigned by turns. Constructed as a sequence of mostly untitled poems, the fractured narrative moves in and out of time and location, creating an emotional autobiography in lyric monologues both interior and dramatic, all delivered in an oddly matter-of-fact tone. In her innovative debut, Pafunda flips our notion of innocence on its back and rubs its belly until it confesses it’s not as pure as we’ve always imagined it to be.

Danielle Pafunda was born in upstate New York. She received her BA from Bard College, where she studied Russian Literature and Creative Writing. In 1999 she moved to New York City. While in New York, she held several jobs, including assistant to the poet David Lehman, publicist for the famed KGB Bar Poetry Reading Series, and teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She received her MFA in Poetry from New School University in May 2002. Publications include Best American Poetry 2004; such print journals as Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Conduit, LIT, and Pleiades; and online journals such as Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Nerve, and Poetry Daily. She is co-Editor of the online journal La Petite Zine and a former Associate Editor of Verse. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, teaching Creative Writing and Composition at the University of Georgia, while pursuing her PhD in English Literature with a Creative Dissertation. She curates Athens’s Vox Reading Series, which showcases both new and established writers, local and visiting. She lives with her husband, their dog, and their cat.

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•
I saved part of the infection in a small plastic bag. A grievance.
You didn’t want me. To turn down your covers, or generate
a low tone. You were wet with radiation sickness.
A pair of eyes came out of you. A pair of wisdom teeth,
a practice…

Eventually, I pinned your left hand behind your back. I sang you,
that boat, that heaven, the three-armed love. Whether there was
a blind wind on... When the sash blew we knew it was close.
The hoodlum tundra, the icicle full of pills. When the first
and perfect, and each one its own tome…

Even my breakage. In the closet, I shook the vehicle… In the
back of the closet, I examined my own fur.
•
Took my hand off the handlebars. Took my hand off the suitcase.
Took my hands out of my pockets and they were the white pages
of a new diary. A stolen diary, and ready to chuck in the snow.

Other times I might’ve told you a little something about yourself.
How you went to the circus and the lion pissed on your mother.
How you ate Japanese pancakes, or had your chest x-rayed for arrowheads.
But this was all before New Year’s. You were standing ankle-deep
on the roof on the other side of town. The fireworks were loused-up.

On a lone walk around the park. Counter-clockwise or poorly executed.

Every night I positioned my pillow to catch the bullet. I kept my teeth
in an intimate place and never heard the machines in the basement. I heard
choir on the street, and was glad for you. I was glad for your girlfriend,
your parents, brother, mascot, tigress, clipper and a few lights
coming in off the bridge. Maybe the boats.

•

By accident, I called the president Daddy. Wasted, one glazier
after another took off his big shoes and put them up on the table.
The press conference shook the television as the bartenderess
came through with a tray of shot, all cast as a vote.

I was hoping they’d be interchangeable. Hoping I was old enough
to go without my girlfriends. A string of birds is like one of pearls
when the hunter gets back. Wherein pearls are like worms, and
the stories about pogrom end in a bird’s wing. Wherein the gingerbread,
rife with buckshot, worn with larvae.

When I got out in the weather, the weather was missing. The hour
slit like an electric cord, splintered, and fused to the pavement.
There was a space in the road where I thought a handsome cab should be.
There was really a space, and you would’ve been here to fill it.

•

Be pretty with me now, I’m not ready for anything else.
The pet is at the door, making her little noises that ask.
I don’t have a lot of time; don’t take it personally.

There’s a headache hanging near the ceiling, waiting
to take root, like they say of dandelion seed, of a fetus.
Like they say in retrospect about the catchy despot,

or the dirty palliatives on the table.

So, okay, let’s take off clothes. Go on and measure me,
but don’t look at me too long. The magazines set a limit.
Scientific. Five minutes. Let’s get going, get it on

and over so you can get me a drink. I’m in it for my own
reasons. I’m in my cups, in glass slippers, there’s a glass
in your hand. By the bed.

•

Wrote the name of the pill on my hand. Wrote one
because that was all I took. I spent a long time making the bed.
It wasn’t because you weren’t home, so much as it wasn’t home
without you there. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.
Took the trash out early, and washed the bottles in the sink.
I wasn’t sad. I was occupied.

The cat was in heat and every advisement involved a bic pen.
The television broke, the toaster inflamed. Around three there was nothing
in the air but air, and I wasn’t asleep. Wrote the name of the pill, wrote
my name, wrote yours. Wrote a couple things I’d been meaning to do.
Wrote married and wondered.

Even in good dreams, I take a piss in the wrong place. I wake up
with sweat between my legs, my hands numb, and thinking
you’re down there at the end of the bed setting up nets
and all kinds of measures.

• FABLE •

When he was mine, I'd milk him. Make his hair
grow. He was, at first, a liar. He was actually
employed by the circus. He was a fandango.
A woman with a nine-foot penis. An inch.

The ghosts of the two wives met him at the foot
of the bed. The first with resin coated hairpiece
and second with red nail lacquer. No. He was
only afraid of the little wolves who lived behind
the little wool skirts. Of girls in closets.

I pooled his underwear around my own ankles.
The little hairs on his back sang a chorus. I took.
His pockets, complicit. I gave, too. A plump.
My little peacock, fanned tail feathers. The cinder.