"Red Carpet A name they call me in the bosom of her family caused me to believe I was her first true love looking into her ways then averting my gaze caused me to believe I was her first true love the illusion of looking in on a concealed world the story of women laughing as a boy listens in caused me to believe I was her first true love"
"comfortable face subject on a pillow folded back the romantic abasement I heard about and mock caused me to believe I was her first true love I am not absolute she compares me to others a feeling of mystic superiority supports me so do I says the leaf falling off so do we say the withered arms and necks of Lake Sokokis canoeing into a whirlpool of the motionless"
Steve Malmude's poems repeatedly examine romantic illusion and longing through recurring refrains of being 'her first true love,' revealing desire, misperception, and abasement. Domestic and natural images—pillows, falling leaves, Lake Sokokis—interweave with feelings of mystic superiority and turned‑inside happiness to produce complex emotional textures. The poetic tone balances charm with a resistance to charm, reflecting dilemmas and survival mechanisms of an assertively independent life. Malmude was born in Manhattan in 1940 to Ukrainian Jewish and German Lutheran parents, shifted from engineering to English and classics, worked as a Bronx carpenter, connected with the St Mark's Poetry Project, and published Catting in 1972.
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