The Sunday Poet: Emily Pineau

 

Poet Emily Pineau

 

Emily Pineau is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College, where she is working on her young adult novel, Except For You. Pineau is an Editorial Assistant at UpToDate, and is on the editorial team of AGNI Magazine and Wilderness House Literary Review. Pineau’s chapbook No Need to Speak (Ibbetson Street Press, 2013) was chosen for The Aurorean’s Chap Book Choice in 2013. She has been featured on New Mexico’s National Public Radio, and has won Salamander Magazine’s Poetry-On-the-Spot contest. Pineau’s poems have appeared in The Broken Plate, Freshwater, Muddy River Poetry Review (which nominated her poem “I Would For You” for a Pushcart Prize), Oddball Magazine, Ibbetson Street, and elsewhere. Pineau lives in the suburbs of Boston with her domesticated lion-cat Symba Bartholomew.

First time in a used bookstore

We kiss in front of horror

books and people without faces

we could make out—

we had a car but books drive

us to face each other

before the papers are signed

before my heart’s stitches dissolve

before we know how it feels

to start over with the sun

fresh on our starved skin.

We breathe hard, but not because

we feel fire and stars,

but because it is the first time

we kissed in a used bookstore.

--Emily Pineau