Leveler Poetry Journal
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Finding Yourself


Sometimes, it is better to let other women have boyfriends
and you remain single. This is better because you don’t enjoy
talking only to women at parties. You are in the habit
of being picked up. There can be several men who like to talk
to you about surfing. You can be interested because they are standing
in the kitchen with the ice. You could also be in a situation
where you are attracted to women. As long as she concedes that
you are the prettier one then everything will move along
much smoother. She may have the better career. It is essential
when you are looking at careers and deciding what will make you
enough money to keep you in Miu Miu, that you choose a career
as carefully as you choose a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a watch.
If you notice that you are choosing on price, then you will be
disappointed. Your boyfriends or girlfriends should never come cheap.
Your career should be rarified in which case they don’t pay a lot.
You need a boyfriend to fill in the gaps. It is unacceptable
to have any sort of work life that requires you to think on your feet.
The slower you go, the less of a challenge it will be
to take care of your skin. Finding yourself may not necessarily be
in a career. You are not lost save when you are in Paris.
There is pressure to pursue goals. Like there are things
you would rather do than drink daiquiris. In any event,
you must try to be irreplaceable. And don’t hide out in magazines
and coffeehouses. Keep your calendar up and make friends.
Maybe one of them will introduce you to an hotelier.




Yvette Johnson

levelheaded: Finding Yourself


This poem is driven largely by the personality of its speaker, and from word one—“Sometimes”—we get an idea of the noncommittal approach she takes to the amorphous concept of “Finding Yourself.” On one hand, the poem is a set of urbane, ironic lifestyle guidelines. On another, it’s a monologue in the language of someone deeply unsatisfied. There is the practical: “The slower you go, the less of a challenge it will be / to take care of your skin.” There is the impractical: “Your career should be rarified in which case they don’t pay a lot.” And then there is the weirdly ambiguous: “You can be interested because they are standing / in the kitchen with the ice.”


Whatever her motives, the speaker’s self-interest doesn’t elicit much sympathy. While she is often disconnectedly humorous—particularly in moments of obliviousness like “She may have the better career” (How charitable!) or “You could also be in a situation / where you are attracted to women” (a “situation”?)—her humor is mitigated by the fact that the speaker equates going to parties, finding men and women to sleep with, shopping for watches, finding a career, taking care of her skin, and drinking daiquiris with “finding” herself. It’s tough not to think we are expected to judge the speaker for what she says. But then she lets this out from behind her disengaged approach to the world:


There is pressure to pursue goals. Like there are things

you would rather do than drink daiquiris. In any event,

you must try to be irreplaceable.


Even if the speaker has a skewed sense of self-discovery, even if we are meant to hear everything she says through a haze of irony, there is something heartbreaking and universal in these lines. Maybe there isn’t anything better than daiquiris, Miu Miu, and social posturing. But even if there is, we’ve all felt the “pressure to pursue goals.” We’ve all wanted “to be irreplaceable.” It’s most important that we can relate to this speaker at all. And as a poem, as a document that reaches out from a specific circumstance to arrive at something human and true, the poem succeeds, and we find ourselves hoping, for better or worse, that she finds her “hotelier” after all.



-The Editors