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# "What Year Are You Interested In?" by Amy Lawless
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/what-year-are-you-interested-in-by-amy-lawless/
- Published: 2013-09-27T14:56:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:45:02.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Amy Lawless for for the latest in a monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Amy Lawless
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

*Our poetry editor,* [*Joe Pan*](http://joepan.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*, has selected a poem by Amy Lawless for for the latest in a* [*monthly series*](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) *that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.*

\* \* \*

![Arthur Rothstein.  "Liberal, Kansas. Soil blown by dust bowl winds piled up in large drifts on a farm" (1936) (image via Library of Congress) http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ds.01322/](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/09/01322r.jpg)

Arthur Rothstein, “Liberal, Kansas. Soil blown by dust bowl winds piled up in large drifts on a farm” (1936) (image via Library of Congress)

## What Year Are You Interested In?

I mean you’re not from the  
dustbowl  
unless you are. Are you?  
It’s so hard to care  
about anything unless one is *in the shit*.  
I’m in the shit.

It’s impossible for me to write a poem  
unless I can wrap my entire chest—  
both tits— in my sadness

D cups.

It’s impossible for me to get out of bed  
without a deep pressure.  
I feel shame in not doing.

I want to tell you a story about survival.  
Once we had a huge fight.

I left Bennigan’s while he was in the bathroom  
because fuck him, right?  
Right?

And I was almost to the corner  
(I knew he didn’t have even five dollars to pay his tab—  
much less the $1.25 to get on the subway home.)  
and out of nowhere  
I heard three steps  
and he pushed me to the ground  
like we were in a football game.  
And I looked at him  
and knew I had to leave him.  
He was a dog who pushed a woman to the ground.  
He would tell you (citing philosophers  
and psychologists) that it was not the act,  
but he was trapped, it was “situational.”

He’d say he was *heh heh* the Bernie Goetz  
of spousal abuse.