Sublimation
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
In a lab in Minnesota, in what they call
the quietest room in the world, decibels dip
into the negatives, meaning there is minus noise,
there is more than silence, and if, like all people,
you think of noise as water and ice as silence,
that sounds impossible, because there’s no stage
beyond ice or silence, there is no secret third thing
to become, but even as I write this I remember
I’m wrong, I remember reading on an ice sculpting forum
in the early 2000s about a sculptor who checked
on his giant ice-fox the morning before judging
and found its entire tail gone, just turned to vapor,
and could feel the flashing blue crystals of its fur
in every breath, and I remember it’s called sublimation
and it sounds like magic to people, because
when we leave a glass of water out on a table
on a hot day, we expect the water to evaporate
but not the glass or the table, we go through life
with the assumption that solid objects, like towels
or rubies or highways, don’t just turn to vapour,
and so we don’t expect ice to, but it does, it does,
and the reverse is called desublimation,
a gaseous substance turning solid, which is how
clouds turn into snow, or how frost just appears
on leaves in the morning, out of the air itself,
almost like moonlight, and this happens to silence too,
we all know this, you leave something unsaid
before going on holiday and come back
to find a new crystal trinket sitting, so still and solid,
on the kitchen table in the shape of a cocoon, a crown,
something abstract but definitely howling,
and this all has something to do, according to the forum,
with the underlying crystalline structure of ice,
or silence, or all things, I forget, but what I wanted
to say about that room in Minnesota
is that I think every room can be that quiet,
that you can shovel all the noise out of a room and still
keep shoveling, that you can freeze the noise
into a block of silence then chisel that silence
into nothing, and the nothing still needs sculpting.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet whose work explores notions of hybridity, translation, and belonging. His poems have won Arc’s Poem of the Year, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. His latest book, Entre Rive and Shore, was a finalist for the BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
A Microdosing, Unemployed Millennial Considers a Termite Colony
by Catriona Wright
like everyone else, I fear
the mother
manipulating their lives
that queen, pale
and pampered
in her chamber, dazzling
pheromones
sterilizing
her competitors
as she creates more
and more workers,
devourers, destroyers
a brood of obedient
collaborators
in her wild delusion
what would it feel like
to surrender
to that swarm
to dream termite dreams
of constructing a self-
cooling cathedral
as grand as
La Sagrada Familia
only with nurseries
instead of naves
our queen,
our queen, ecstatic
with eggs,
each pale jewel
beloved, already
an extension
of our shared mind,
that orgiastic,
delirious structure built
to resist the self’s
insistence
Catriona Wright is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection, Continuity Errors, was a finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the poetry collection Table Manners and the short story collection Difficult People. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Grain, The New Quarterly, and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry.
Fields
by Bren Simmers
after Brent MacLaine
Just as each field has a name
on a farm, the back field, the hill field,
the end of all known fields, the yard
contains smaller leas: the experimental
forest of asparagus and strawberries,
kitchen garden of fresh onion
greens and oregano, the perennial
berm and snow plow sunflower
bed out front that all the dogs water.
So too, the universe is made of fields,
the physicist said, and all the poets
went scrambling for their pencils,
those layers of carbon atoms that
when disturbed, propagate ideas
across the page, which is its own kind
of field, sewn together into signatures
in a book. Even the universe itself
is stitched together from seventeen
quantum fields into one giant electro-
magnetic quilt, just as grass is made
up of clover, chickweed, dandelion,
dock, plantain, and so on. The world
and everything in it, waves in a continuous
field. A particle, a body, in constant flux,
becomes fixed only when measured,
named. Meet me in the field
where language is undone.
Bren Simmers is the winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Her latest poetry collection The Work (Gaspereau Press) was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards. She lives on Epekwitk/PEI.
Photo by Mike Needham
tottenham marshes on the night of the solar eclipse
by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
sun over moon brings a slow skim of rain
over the wimpling marshes a bike pulls out the dark
needling a path through the blotted evening
the stories of those who were dead
and from the dead return
are mine now. since i am at the procession of my life
my own six swords
the ferryman the woman the child all the same leaving
silt water blue water bog water dammed
water there are no metaphors
for water or the train hauling itself over the tracks after the euro rail
only distance, speed, and time
no choice but to see life as a gift the way a fox can only be seen
through the bush when it moves alighting an old us
coming alive by not looking for
the other spotted in the wild
asking the question of the hunt begun or over
by not being in the endless time of blue and green
the world as we know it in maps sold everywhere no
this life is formed in an excess of water
amniotic seams and the breathy kindling of gulls
glassed through new roots sedge reed grasses bee orchids
names given to the slow sentience of our remembering
calling in the season of our nakedness.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being. She splits her time between Canada and the UK, where she teaches creative writing and is at work on a novel.
Iowa, with Love
by Adedayo Agarau
This city owes me audacity. We were drinking in a bar downtown,
laughing at the hockey players gnarling at one another over a tiny ball sliding over ice
& over the clink of glasses, which we do each time they hit into one another on the TV.
We talked about poems, about the houses downtown, that the cost of living here is not
Money, it’s loneliness. You told me of the guy who kissed you at a bar downtown
on a Thursday evening, after a date at Uncle Sun, where ies hovered over the dips, & the
nonchalance of their waitpeople. You said he said sorry afterward as if his desire toward you was a mistake.
“I know a thing or two about mistakes,” I say,” coming here, for instance, means thinking that only
poems can open the world to us. That this country is a dream passing, we shouldn't stay and shouldn’t
dream of staying.” A man, almost past his prime, wearing a yellow, black Iowa Hockey jersey,
with a cup of beer in his hand, suddenly chipped in and asked where we were from.
I said, “Iowa, the Iowa Writers Workshop.” A line of dissatisfaction wrote itself on his face.
“I mean, where are you originally from,” he responded, almost worried about our misfit.
The skull of the antelope on the wall caught my eye. I wondered if it was real.
If they stabbed it with a knife and roasted it dry. If it was synthetic. The man stood, waiting
for an answer, his glass of beer, like a neck, fastened in his hand. He motioned his cup to arrive at
the parallel of his throat, almost pretending to sip. I nally say, “we are Nigerians.”
“Yorubas,” I added to avoid him misplacing us on our map. Two childhood friends in the writers' workshop,
in the hands of a ferocious city, its people unkind in the tone of their question, the desperation
of their desires. How he looked at you, almost with the intensity of body set ablaze, how he must have thought
he could, for the night, toss you over and wear you in, unwrapped. Later, he sat beside us.
What the body makes the worst of us do. Laughed with us as we laughed at the men on TV fighting
over a puck sliding over ice. Said something about hating hockey because we said we don’t understand
the rage, and the violence of American sports. The night went on, passing batons over to drunkenness &
in a corner, two men are kissing in front of a girl. We did not notice that man’s silent disappearance.
Ziad and His Cats
by Rebecca O’Connor
The last dispatch from Ziad, a thirty-five-year old man
in Gaza, was published in the Guardian on 6 March 2024.
Ziad is on a beach with his sister,
trying to find a charging point for his phone,
though none exists.
He has a solar pack on his back
which he uses exclusively to feed his friends,
siphoning the energy to the weakest at night.
Some have learned how to photosynthesize.
What else would you have them do
in this desert without water or food?
He pays particular attention to the babies
who had to be taken from their incubators.
Like delicate wood anemone,
they need coaxing towards the sun.
Not all of them survive.
But he carries on, in the dark,
trying to keep as many as possible alive.
He doesn’t have time to write to us.
Or to explain the process.
It’s too complicated anyway.
Humans have to be whittled down to bone
before they can eat light.
Some gorge on it.
Their tongues torque into liquorice sticks.
For how can you wet the tongue with sunlight?
He keeps a small bag of za’atar in his pocket,
dips his finger in once in a while,
sleeps when he can—under a tarpaulin with his sister
and all the stray cats of the world.
Rebecca O’Connor’s debut collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Irish Times Shine Strong Award. Her poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Review and elsewhere. Her debut novel, He Is Mine and I Have No Other, was published in 2018. She is co-founder and director of The Moth.
Placenta
by Ash Adams
I, like any animal,
will eat one hundred bloody masses
if it will help anything,
because animals know that predators
do not run from the wound
but seek it out, that the safest place
to hide something is inside.
Some eat the whole placenta,
lick small howls of the night clean,
which is the work,
the blood and bones, of a mother:
with the heart of a gambler who will not quit,
a doe in the woods tastes flesh for the first time.
Ceremony can hide but not fix
something breaking, something obvious.
No strap can strangle or save the lesson
that it is easy to live for someone
and much harder to die.
One night, I released a balloon
filled with my own air
into a world immediately
more dangerous and more beautiful.
One night, I became untethered, a skydiver,
and knew differently that even for all the feeling,
there is no way to hold on to beauty,
only so much time before the ground.
After the Diagnosis
by Clare Labrador
My sisters lend their hands—paperweight
to keep my forehead from scattering.
We are all in the living room waiting
for the sadness to surge up my throat.
Mother had taken the overnight bus
and arrived at my doorstep too early;
I do not know how to explain
this headache seeping into my mind.
We hear the familiar silence at the end
of phone calls I rejected pretending
I was busy while I was busy
trying to get out of bed.
We throw out the furniture to search
for fingers I had broken off
keeping my bedroom door closed.
No one is surprised to see me scattered;
I’ve been cutting myself into parts for years.
Find my throat at the back of the freezer,
my feet under the swimming pool,
my stomach all over the bathroom floor.
I’ve shed my scalp on pillows.
Mother collects the scales and stitches
each flake back into my skull.
Maybe I should stay on the couch, safe
from a world that wants to swallow me whole,
or maybe I dream of having more than this—
the weight of my chest to hold me down.
I count the pills in my cabinet, each one
a promise at the end of some parted sea.
Tomorrow, we’ll find the rest of my body.
I’ll slip into my bones and wear my skin.
Instructions for Listening to Dead Sister
by Stephanie Heit
Assume communication.
Treat death as another state of being with its own frequency, tonal tides.
Tune into antenna hairs inside your ears and nose, back of neck, lower arms that radio information from the other side.
Bypass the brain’s rationale for sudden cold/warmth, swish of curtains, unexplained reflections.
Speak her name. Incantation to breath, to syllables alive in saliva.
Remember the silence at dinner. Period between sentences. The story of her stillbirth your mother doesn’t tell. A foot in the crack where light exits. Sensitivity to shadows and their mistranslations.
Swim in the waters where she swam, double boiler of womb and sweetwater.
Look for her translucence, a hint of form, knuckle, soft baby femur, a summary of parts.
Glimpse her between the silver flare distraction of a perch school. Ghosts of sturgeon, ancient lake monsters whose presence and absence glide her deep haunts.
Trust vibrations, extremes of sun, fluid portals, air pops, alarms. Her want a beat in your venous flow.
Pause when she asks to trade places.
Hum to her a desperate cradle-and-all lullaby.
Switch to a funereal dirge.
Sing her back to the grave.
You Say You’ve Never Left Home?
by Kelly Rowe
Have you been a step-child?
Then you’ve travelled, arrived in the dark
in a foreign city where you couldn’t
understand a word anyone said.
But what if you stayed for years,
learned the maypole dances, how to cook
the sweet and salty holiday dishes,
knew the punchlines of every joke?
You’re still pretty sure that the splinter
lodged in your throat is a sign to those
who took you in, that in hard times
it will be you chosen to walk out of the city
and on to the border, passing,
with head down, the coffee shop
with the scent of cardamom,
where every day you hear the quiet
rolling of “R”s, that rounded flutter,
and the national anthem you practiced
until your thick tongue danced,
held tight on its leash like a bear.
Kelly Rowe’s debut collection, Rise Above the River (2023), won the Able Muse Book Award and was a finalist for the Arizona Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Child Bed Fever, and Flying South on the Back of a Dove.
A Familiar Story
by Owen Torrey
In the book the train left the station, but I was still waiting by the tracks. By the time I noticed, the scene had moved on. It was without me. It followed a young boy to a city where he was welcomed by two people described as his parents. I spent that night alone in the station, sleeping near a window that looked over low trees and a lake. Though I did not know it yet, I would come to know this view well. Somewhere in the world the boy attended a school where he showed a special aptitude for geography. He seemed to always know where things were. Where others saw a shape, he saw a continent. Where others saw green, he saw Moldova. This is a bildungsroman, I thought to myself as the boy passed from year to year. Most nights I cooked the same meal of French eggs in the station restaurant. At this point, I realized I had been left behind. I had no illusion the story would find me again. Though I was grateful for what was here. The violin music that played overhead through hidden speakers. The big fountain where water flowed from a lion’s mouth. There are worse lives. After a few years, the boy received some accolades for his abilities. He worked hard. He spent hours looking at photos of landscapes around the world, trying to locate himself. Sometimes I knew the answer before he did, and I wished I could whisper him a hint. But over time I began to forget about the boy. I read my way through the other books in the train station bookshop. I lay down on the train tracks at night. This was safe because nothing ever came. I felt the cool metal beneath me and watched the glass dome above through which the stars never moved. I did this so many nights I got older. So did the boy. At the encouragement of his friends, he applied to participate in a TV show. Contestants watch a video from the perspective of a train and try to guess where it is in the world. Whoever answers first wins. I remembered this show. I had watched it once when I was in Sweden, stuck all day in a hotel room with a terrible cold. This is a novel that draws from life, I thought. This is a Swedish-language novel, I considered. I had stopped checking on the boy much, but this part began to interest me again. The boy, who was now a young man, dressed in his best suit and stood on the stage below a video of green fields. Occasionally, a fence. Argentina, the boy whispered. This was correct. He advanced to the next round and the next. In the final round, the screen showed a landscape with a large lake on one side and a tall escarpment on the other. There was silence in the studio. Everyone was thinking hard. The track stretched further until a clutter of low buildings appeared. The noise of the train grew louder and louder. At a certain point I realized the sound was coming, not only from the book, but from the distance. I watched as a train arrived in the station and looked into its wide glass eye. I saw myself sitting on the tracks. The boy looked at me for the first time. His eyes were exactly like I remembered, and almost like they were described. I had missed him, though he did not know who I was. I wished I could give him a hint. But nothing I could say would help. We both did not know where we had arrived.
Owen Torrey’s work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Maisonneuve, Geist, Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Unseasonal, is forthcoming from Signal Editions/Véhicule Press. Owen lives in Providence, RI, where he is an MFA candidate at Brown University.
The Water Birth
by K. Maya Kanazawa
K. Maya Kanazawa is a librettist, screenwriter, and poet. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and was an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at Princeton University. She has published essays in Comparative Literature, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and Amaltea Journal of Myth Criticism. Her libretto for All of Us, a chamber opera by composer Hippocrates Cheng, premiered in June 2024 at the Center for Performing Arts in Carmel, Indiana.
Wildfire as a Psychological Survey
by Savannah Tate
It’s a wildfire but he reaches into it with bare hands
and goosebumps, like any decent brother.
He laughs as he does it, laughter like a knocked-
over ink pot spilling ink into all those crazy
flames and staining the silence like ink stains
paper or cloth or probably the underside of
your skin, if you were to peel it off like you peel
an orange and turn it inside out. Laughter
staining silence, do you see it? Do you see the
wildfire’s gotten past his skin and into his meat
now, all those ligaments and chalky bones sucking
up the heat of the inferno like anemic vampires
while his twin-moon eyes wax and wane.
Crescent, gibbous, full. He looks unfamiliar
but so familiar. You could be him. He could be
your brother, any decent brother. Reaching into
that fire as if into the jagged skyline of New York
or Tokyo, skyscrapers like teeth in a maw that
swallows galaxies one by one. The heat is
reaching him now, do you see it? His laughter
trickles away like paper boats on a river as big
as this life. His moon eyes blink and you see
all their dried seas filled with opals. The craters
of his flesh brim with fire and like any good
saint he lets it rewrite him into a face
someone someday might die to kiss goodnight.
Poem in Praise of the Hinge
by Kelly M. Houle
Praise the small, the brass-barrelled, the cast-iron doubles.
Praise the spring-loaded with well-oiled knuckles.
One leaf mortised firmly to the cabinet, the other to the door,
the hinge works to ensure that two wings function as one.
Praise the binder who hands to an idea its cardboard wings.
Praise the soundness of the single stitch,
the loop of linen thread that ties signatures
together in knotted kinship at the spine.
Praise the concealed hinge that allows
spring leaves to unfold in familiar ways
when seasons do not follow plan or history.
In the presence of the unhinged, we face
the rage of the clipped-winged. The fanged, unarmed
are condemned to wag in one dimension
those dispossessed of armature cannot embrace.
The spineless do whatever invertebrates can—
bite the heads off unsuspecting mice.
The marvelous jaw that can do this was born
uninhibited by any principle of charity.
The unhinged must be gifted trust at first,
the gift we notice in the faceless
Victory of Samothrace, the leap of faith
fluttering the drapery. Her feathered wings,
upon which all successes hinge, are not attached
with paraffin and tallow. No, we’ve been waxed
before by hollow gestures toward redemption.
Trust instilled in the hinge is a trust that must be earned,
her wings were pieced together over centuries.
Kelly M. Houle’s poetry has been published in CALYX, Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review, Radar Poetry, Sequestrum, and other publications. In 2024 she was named a finalist for the Arts and Letters “Unclassifiable” contest and third place winner of the Vivian Shipley Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society.
Elegy with TV Repairman & the Black Moth of Light
by Marcus Wicker
In a flash of light the frame is empty.
The tube is out, but the sound hangs on.
My reflection, suddenly static –
stilled slurry in the sixty-inch screen.
When you come back
as the tv repair man with an aux cord
& MIDI beats. As spittle & a cheesy record.
Your easy laugh flapping at the seams of his empty
mouth. A pinched sound wave played back.
Nasally, bereft of pretty teeth. But still you. Switched on
& refusing to troubleshoot. DOOM played off screen
like a name tag, when you returned as a photostatic
negative. Inverted with light. As hum of radio static
from the other side against causality. No “Pinched cord”
or “Bad fuse.” No recourse for the blanked screen-
saver: two Black suns, linked against a dorm wall. The frame an empty
text bubble blued by loss. Unfixable as a Scantron
voided after an early bell. Without answers you’ve come back
to me. Mush mouthed, sniffling. Mumbling “defect.” Come back
as nothing ghoulish. Neither absolution nor malice, for my astatic
contact, the missed kids’ parties. For waiting too long to check in on
your family. Here you are, whistling by the sofa table, aux cord
in-hand. Waving off doom with your gospel rap. Marking empty
journals. Inviting me to worship team rehearsal. Never mind my HD heap.
I think I see your mouth leaking honey. But then the screen
is transfigured & I am prostrate. Fever-drenched. Crawling back
& forth between beds on the top floor, emptied
of breath, fluids, faith. Everything but this ecstatic
loneliness that grates like shame in the body unanswered. Discordant
& sick, dolorous. My dismay is on-
going when you flutter down from the ceiling fan & alight on
my philtrum. You’re here then gone & I am baffled by God. Weeping
& angry with myself for not loving you in the right chord.
With looped handclaps. & 808 lungs. As chorus & verse – nothing back-
masked. I miss your baroque laugh most, misting lightness. Dear Ray. Dear static
guard. I miss you whole. Missed your last call. My window to reconnect: empty.
& yet, you return at dawn. As percussion. As a screen yanked back
on my grief. As sequined black tambourine wings towing me from stasis
with an aux cord, ringing out: Come close. You don’t have to be empty.
The Door
by Emily Berry
The summer my mother decided to die
she was not in her right mind, they said,
to show decisions didn’t come into it,
not the usual kind. Word I could not say,
you abide inside my mind, with your three
sliding syllables, your sibilance, a snake
too scared to strike. When I speak the phrase,
it falls away. Own life, they always say,
still marvelling that such a thing was there
for taking, in such a way. How a person
becomes other to themselves, we cannot
bear to own. The door to my mother’s death
is jammed ajar. The strip of light it throws
panels the floor. Sometimes I see her in there,
tracing a finger across some ancient text
as the gargoyles of her mind watch over her,
the enormous shadows of the things
she left behind. Mother, where did you go?
Portrait in the attic, bones under the earth;
voice of my life, far off, calling me home.
Emily Berry is the author of three poetry collections published by Faber & Faber: Dear Boy (2013), Stranger, Baby (2017), and Unexhausted Time (2022). She is editor-in-chief of the bedtime stories app Sleep Worlds.
Photo by Sophie Davidson.
Are You Still Happy with Your Home?
by Medrie Purdham
for our realtor, who regularly asks
She taught us once what soffits were; she keeps in touch.
Sends us each a card on the other’s birthday, gives us
things to plant: supermoon pumpkin, midnight snack tomato.
Ices her own photorealistic likeness onto sugar cookies,
probes our existential state. Annually, we consume her
in effigy, with mulled wine and hesitation.
No, forms my reply. We can’t be happy, the house has failed.
We dismantled our child’s alchemy lab and now
it seems it never was: no curio bottles, cuttings
or barks, unguents. There’s nothing brewing inside
anything anyone ever called an alembic, there’s no perplexity over
untransmuted things. Where have the essences gone,
I never ask. When she measured the backyard, it was not
to assess the space we’d have for running around
in costume: cotton batting and linen pants. We never enacted
the 1912 cyclone, never pretended to bash the windows
out of the legislature. Never shrieked for joy.
We had green space and, in time, were supposed to turn it
into ourselves, full bloom, that’s all. But the small
rituals these grounds hosted were indebted human goods.
We lulled ourselves to sleep with minor stories. In the hatchery
that’s gone, no eggs were moved by their own internal radiance
to draconic self-revelation. No dragon pets!
No morning where a child believed the cat said rock and roll
or posed pregnancy questions. Did you call yourself I or we?
The robot whose job it is to make paper clips would eventually turn
all matter into a paper clip factory, or so I read.
Were we right to overturn our piece of earth and will we therefore
bury ourselves eventually? In the beginning, she said the snow
deepening on our roof was good, it was a sign. It showed
how much of our energy we’d keep, how much we’d lose.
Medrie Purdham lives in Regina, Saskatchewan (Treaty 4), and is the author of Little Housewolf (Véhicule, 2021), which was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Fred Cogswell award, and won a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her work has appeared several times in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books / Biblioasis).
Temenos
by Gregory Leadbetter
This garden is laid like the footprint of a temple
dug from a plain of lizard-picked earth
that remembers the buried city in its gut
only in the ghost of a name that blows
with its dust in heat without rain.
This garden is a ghost whose name is lost.
This might be a knotwork of roots that bound
the bright space of a soul in its hedge,
if a soul can be sown and raised in a place:
might show in lupin, rose and vine,
the scarlet anemone spilt on the air,
the hum of all living cupped in a flower.
The one who walked in the shade of its noon
ate figs pulled from the flesh he had grown.
Finches perched on its speechless thought
while thrushes spoke from its bower in flames.
The one who listened is a soul gone to seed
in ivy that creeps over barren ground.
This garden is the grave of its hallowed plot:
this outline the cell of an empty god.
The cicada sings from its hollow skin.
At the centre of the garden is a rough-hewn post
draped with a cloak and a purple bough,
hung with the mask of a laughing face.
Gregory Leadbetter’s books and pamphlets of poetry include The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025), Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021), Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.
With Lines from Virginia Woolf
by Jennifer Franklin
1.
I belong to quick futile moments of intense feeling.
Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people. Never
to people with their unyielding bodies, their incessant needs.
The way they must be tended to at the same time
each day—food, walk around the garden, sleep.
Yes, moments—fierce, furtive, fleeting. Finished
but not gone. Finished but present, an after-image,
the glow of the small front garden in the summer
house on the island. The sound of the waves on the beach
reaching me in my cool nursery sheets. The shadows
the curtain made on the floorboards. Father’s library
tight on the shelves like secrets wanting to be found.
The dog asleep in the bushes, her soft body rising
with her slow breath. The water always calling me home.
2.
Nothing has really happened until it has been described.
Not the walks through the park, the sun streaming
through the bushes, not watching for the eclipse—all
of us together on the hill, waiting for the grass to darken.
Not the sound of the waves beating the beach as I lay
in the nursery, light lifting the curtains. Nothing
has happened, not the unwanted touch, not the lies,
not the doctors’ exams or their condescending theories.
Not the conversations in brocaded rooms, my sharp
tongue keeping the tumult of what plagues me at bay.
Not the gardens—the fat peonies wide as fists.
And not the dog running through the garden,
endlessly believing she will reach a sparrow before
it lifts its small singing body into the elm.