Sometimes I am a foot soldier.
I am deep in the place
where the mountainsides talk.
I go down keeping watch.
I go down begging for the places I know.
I go down without courage,
missing pieces of myself.
When they find me, my body
is like every other body.
Except that I tucked
your picture into my breast pocket.
And you never learn
that you watched over me,
and you never learn
that you kept me safe.
You are at home
with our sycamore trees,
and you never learn
that you saved my life.
How wonderful to be a lake,
A river slow, or placid pond.
A happy home to fishes make,
While lapping at a cattail frond.
How pleasant to be rained upon,
And to provide refreshing drink.
A place to rest the graceful swan—
That would feel rather nice, I think.
i will let my voice lilt gently over breezes unseen,
under sweeping branches, through window panes, into jam making sessions
sugar everywhere, water boiling, giggles dissolving into soft breathing into arms around arms.
as i accept that i need to find a new place to situate myself,
there is no home for me in arms trained to reach around a body that is not mine.
as i realize my love was not perfect, it was broken and pained
i held it together like my heart–with tape and sticks and patches of forgetting.
as i find my place in a world where windows are closing left and right,
where breezes are shut out by curtains,
where voices are drowned out with loudspeakers announcing the coming tide,
no time for finding love
not for someone like me.
A.H. Berry
I wake up with arms around you
unstuck in time.
I have no memory
of fumbling
with my backpack,
or chemo-induced retching,
or being in the backseat while
the car drives away,
door still open.
All I know is the clacking of
the chinchillas’ claws in their cage,
a softened, humanized
version of warmth
on your skin,
the sunlight swaddling us both.
I stroke your hair as you stir,
and a part of myself I do not know
gives thanks in ways I do not understand
for the rise and fall
of your chest
and the knowledge that downstairs,
there is pancake bread to be toasted
for you and me
alone.
Day is a caught thing.
I let if off-leash,
and the dog,
onto the coast where I stand
delivered from night.
I’m in the state I was born in
twenty-one years after I was born in it
the ocean looks like a lake
this time of year,
the unfeeling sky looms
and the dog,
that comatose god,
does not come when I call it.
I have asked twice
and still he barrels
towards the carcass:
a crab, or a striped bass
and once, a pelican,
its angel white body
splayed and
upturned to the sky.
I have screamed one hundred times
and the dog still does not listen out
for my cries,
still buries its exhausted,
uncomplicated body into
the unbeating flesh
of some other animal
spine against spine,
soft belly against soft belly,
squirming with a vigor
of expected reciprocity.
The most perfect thing
I know of still
is two animals greeting each other.
That, even in death,
one wants a piece of another.
That one is calling another
and another is lying dead on the sand
and another is rejoicing
in the smell of it. And once,
I stood on this beach
and tossed my grandmother,
who was a Ziploc bag of ashes, into a wave.
That one came back to another shore.
Mackenzie Whitehead-Bust
It is always desire
that we both desire.
We sit in a parked car.
This is our lot,
but it could be any lot.
We do not drive until
there is a destination.
It is 10 pm on a Tuesday,
election season,
and we have just begun
the process
of learning each other’s
ugliest tendencies—
and, thus,
becoming in love.
For purposes of expediency
we compromise and cheer ourselves up
with sex and an hour of dumb YouTube.
Something is moving through.
Something is moving through.
I have consumed not a drop of water.
All day I idle.
There is a longing, and beneath it,
a deeper, more prolonged longing.
The first is easier to deal with,
and so we make toast and eggs,
with yolk cooked perfectly.
We let it drip onto our fingers,
feel satisfied,
fill out our ballots for the illusion
of choice, of impact on future.
Up There, your father, who is a pastor,
says there is somebody who is deciding.
I plead in the ways I know how.
Something is moving through.
Something is moving through.
While playing zombies for the thousandth time,
your housemate says to the other men
Bro, you know that feeling
when you don’t feel anything,
and sex doesn’t feel good anymore?
Men always joke
when what they mean to say is:
am I normal, or do I need help?
We work in fits and starts,
in fits and starts, we move on through.
I present my feminist manifesto to my therapist
and she says is it really that bad
to pretend you’re having an ok time
if you’re having an ok time,
which, I admit, was radically honest
but too much for me to consider
at the time.
At the time, I turn 21.
I don’t invite anyone to my birthday party
directly,
so that my friends have to
prove themselves to me,
which they do
exceedingly, painfully well.
You say that at this point
you are apathetic to the possibility
that everything
down to the last
blade of grass
could change, at any moment
and with no warning.
I agree, though I have decided
that my main fear
is that it already happened,
and we haven’t been looking
at what we thought we were looking at
for many months now.
And, when we bike
through the cemetery at dusk
and the stranger yells
No—
pleads—
Stop!
People’s ancestors
have laid their heads to rest
right there,
right there,
really she is saying
please respect the rules
that remain
unbreakable,
such as:
do not disrespect graves,
and always say thank you,
and there is a cost for everything,
and desire, like energy,
cannot be created nor destroyed.
