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The Halo Rule Teresa Leo 1-932418-25-3 $16.00 ©2008 order this title       Teresa Leo's poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Women's Review of Books, New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Italian Americana, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and has received fellowships from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She works at the University of Pennsylvania.
from Halo Rules
The Double Ds of Desire and Despair are in the long, slow torso of a woman bent back, seeing and not being seen. It's a cache problem: a steady line of two-faced two-fers on a Saturday night, the Double Divas porn site he logged off of when she walked in the room. No honesty counter, no small-breasted action figure to save this boy who meets the world then checks his e-mail before he shuts down. He spins around in his chair with the kind of satisfaction that comes from the gotten-over-on, the something-well-transacted, the just-got-greased. This is the old fish story that legends are made of, not the come-heres and fisticuffs of what actually happened, what made her go to the living room, let him finger her while watching the movie, the way he'll be distracted, later, during sex, by Rodin's Nude hanging over the bed like a broad-band vision of all that looks good but doesn't speak. When he starts the NC-17 talk in her ear, she listens carefully, arches her back, murderous and sentimental, like a staircase.