41. Sean Manzano Labrador, "The Dark Continent"

I've been stuck on this one for a while. The dark continent is Africa. Freud famously used the phrase to refer to female sexuality, grafting misogyny onto racism. Labrador uses the phrase as a title of his poem that seems to be about his girlfriend, and his own inability to understand her sexuality: "it is a dark passage we share in the lightout to get to lips." "we both read mythologists and psychoanalysts / they did not teach me Greek but a lover of Bartók / who said 7 years ago my smoking was my girlfriend / substitute."

The poem has interesting moments, grafting a pastoral motif unto the sexual thematics in a way I didn't entirely follow. (I'm not implying that the poem itelf is necessarily sexist, although if someone made that argument I wouldn't object.)

I give it an 8 for its overall exuberance and its flashes of brilliance.