A letter from Orville to Wilbur
the evening before their first flight:

The Wright Brothers,
Orville and Wilbur,
are known as the first engineers
to successfully design, build,
and operate an aircraft.

Brother,
last week, I overheard a joke:
What do you call
Two men who think they can fly?

A funeral.
To be honest, I didn’t think it was funny either.

The whole town has become
an ocean of pointed fingers.

People I once called friends
are now just a tidal wave of unsolicited advice.
They’re trying to rinse out the color from our dreams.

Yesterday, a lady from church pulled me aside
and said,
If God wanted us in the sky,
He would have given us wings.

And I replied, Isn’t that what imagination is?
The act of actually going somewhere
that others can only think of?

Brother, sometimes,
people who have never even tried to run a mile
will tell you that a marathon is too far.

Some people will try to talk you out
of jumping into the water

simply because they have
always been too scared to learn how to swim.

Fear is when the brain digs out all faith from the body
and then calls it survival.

Fear is when we turn up the volume on
everything that might go wrong
and then allow it to speak louder than our courage.

But for those who do not worship at the altar of panic,
for those who will not sacrifice their ambitions
to a demigod of worst-case scenarios,
for those who do not give up,
failure is just a short story they tell
before they talk about success.

I know this process has been difficult.
The miscalculations, the hours we’ve put in,
the days we spend away from our families.

But every time I walk outside,
I can feel the ground getting nervous,
like it knows it cannot keep us here much longer
because we are destined for a higher calling.

I hear them say it’s impossible,
but I say everything is until it’s not.

They call us stupid.
I say stupid and brave are just two sides of the same coin.
The only difference is whether you guess correctly
before the penny hits the floor.

Tomorrow,
we will call gravity a liar.
We will kiss God on the face.
Tomorrow, I will look you in the eyes,
and I will say, I told you the wind would feel different up here.

What they think does not matter.
When we are in the clouds,
we won’t even be able to see them.

Brother,
I have a joke.
What do you call the first
two men in the world who figure out how to fly?

 Legends.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Excuse Me As I Kiss the Sky by Rudy Francisco. Copyright (c) 2023 Button Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

I desired lemonade—

It was hot and I had been walking for hours—

but after much wrestling,

pushing and shoving,

I simply could not get my couch

through the restaurant door.

Several customers and the owner

and the owner’s son

were kinder than they should have been,

but finally it was time to close

and I urged them to return to their homes,

their families needed them

(the question of who needs what

was hardly my field of expertise).

That night, while sleeping peacefully

outside the train station

on my little, green couch,

I met a giantess by the name of Anna Swan.

She knelt beside my couch

and stroked my brow with tenderness.

She was like a mother to me

for a few moments there under the night sky.

In the morning, I left my couch in Tatamagouche,

and that has made a big difference.

 __________________________________

From Hell, I Love Everybody by James Tate. Copyright © 2023 by James Tate. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

We salvage ourselves. We savage ourselves.
Octobers mean grief, deep into our bones.
Can you spell worship? Do you mean warships?
Are family trees reddening? you ask.
When I say grief, I mean rage. I, mean strong.
I news-water my nightmares. I, blue song
who evaded at least two wars, can’t sleep.
What do histories say to holy books?
That we remain silent, fear for our jobs
when hospitals are bombed? Do you believe
walls sever memories? & is God there?
This didn’t begin with our people, no.
Ask any natives & they will tell you
the lands remember, even when tongues don’t.

The lands remember, even when tongues don’t.
Ask any natives & they will tell you
this didn’t begin with our people. No
walls sever memories. & is God there
when hospitals are bombed? Do you believe
that we remain silent, fear for our jobs?
What do histories say to holy books
who evaded at least two wars? Can’t sleep.
I news-water my nightmares. I blue-song
when I say grief. I mean rage. I mean strong,
our family trees. Reddening, you ask,
Can you spell worship? Do you mean warships?
Octobers mean grief. Deep into our bones,
we salvage ourselves. We. Savage. Ourselves.

It will surprise few to hear poets have a reputation for hoarding their discontents. Call it an occupational hazard for the “unacknowledged legislators,” those who devote their lives to making an undersung art that often leaves its practitioners feeling skinless and misunderstood. For example, one of the measures of success as a poet is having one’s work selected for inclusion in an anthology. Yet for many poets, as soon as they learn the happy news that their poems will be included, certain irritable and irrepressible questions creep to mind: “Why have the editors chosen these particular poems? Why not this other poem I wrote recently and like better?? Is this really my best work???” Imagine if we got to choose our own poems to represent us in an anthology. In Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, we did just that: our idea was to have a diverse range of poets choose a single poem that best represents a personal artistic touchstone thus far in their writing life, or maybe more broadly as a human being. This anthology serves as an intimate record of what these many poets believe and have believed is most essential to engaging with their work.

—Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips, editors

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
by Diane Seuss

She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.

I have been writing poems since I was fourteen years old. I typed them on a manual typewriter. This was in the early 1970s, and the typewriter was old even then, probably from the 1930s. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know where it went. I learned something from every poem I ever wrote, even if it was ill conceived, cloying, or stupid. When I was eighteen, I learned by writing a poem called “MONSTER WOMAN.” The title and many of the words were typed in all caps. “She BIG AND MEAN,” it began. “ShCRASHIN through the RAZZberries. She EAT THE BRAINS of fawns, young quail, ROCK STARS, and RATS…” Sort of silly, but from that poem I learned that I could bend language and typography to my own transgressive purposes, that I could invent a self on the page, though in “MONSTER WOMAN” I described that self in the third person. She was one dimensionally powerful, stalking the landscape. Cartoonish. Green. In writing her, I laid claim to something in myself I hadn’t yet enacted in the world. The poem ended this way: “No use RUNNIN. No use bein SCARED, MISTER. Just PUT ON that FOOTBALL HELMET and KISS the good life GOODBYE.” I’d never read a poem like that. I don’t know why I thought I could write one.

A few decades later, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl” came to be. Overtly, it seems to have little to do with “MONSTER WOMAN,” but it may carry a similarly transgressive tenor, albeit managed very differently. The impetus for the poem was a dream. All I remembered of it, on waking, were the words “STILL LIFE” emblazoned in the dark behind my eyelids. I had always loved visual art—I was an art history minor in college—but I hadn’t been particularly drawn to still life painting. But here it was, announcing itself in my dream. I did what all contemporary mystics do with dream information. I googled it. The first painting that came up was Rembrandt’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I fell in love with the title. Such a fancy bird, but here, dead, ready to be consumed by the eye and the mouth, and then the tagging on of “a girl” at the end—oh, by the way—there’s a girl. The painting itself drew me in further. One peacock hangs upside down by its foot from what looks to be a hooked cord. Its wings are splayed, exhibiting the variegations of its feathers. The head hangs upside down, sharp beak in profile. The other peacock rests in a pool of blood upon a counter or table. Behind and between the bodies of the birds is a basket filled with apples. These are the primary elements of still life in the painting: apples, birds, and blood. The painting would not have entered my imagination so deeply without the girl, leaning on her elbows in the windowsill from out of the dark and gazing at the scene, matching us gaze for gaze. Don’t we all love looking at dead things?

I had been writing American Sentences, Allen Ginsberg’s invention. Ginsberg believed the anglicized three-line haiku (haiku are traditionally written in a single vertical line of seventeen syllables in Japanese) didn’t work in English. He thought the more “American” version of the haiku, an offshoot, would be a single seventeen-syllable sentence trekking across the page. It occurred to me that I might somehow respond to the painting in a series of American Sentences. Readers might not pick up on the syllable count, but it would provide me with a compressive practice. Keep me from wandering off the edge of the page. And what if I limited myself to fourteen lines, a kind of sonnet? The syllable-counting became an alternative to meter and rhyme. It offered up another sonic pattern—more syntax than music.

The first line became my guide into the rest of the poem: “She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.” Situation, conflict, subject. In writing toward seventeen syllables, I found myself defining the girl in primal observations. She is hungry. She seeks not just any food, but pie. Instead of pie, she gets dead peacocks. She comes out of the dark. She is not of the house. She is outside it, looking in. A peasant. An Other. Then the poem’s true subject came sliding in. “She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie. / Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous.” There is hunger and there is beauty. There is pie and there is peacock. A tension between art that feeds and art that offers us gratuitous beauty. Between “the gold house of the rich” and the people’s hunger. And, more personally, between outsider and insider, rural girl and poetry world.

Poems are smarter than I am. Like dreams, they come out of the dark and lead me to uncanny arrivals. The syllable counting, and the fourteen lines and the volta, or turn of thought, that we see in traditional sonnets, distracted my analytical brain enough for the deeper, more mysterious content to ooze up from the cytoplasmic goo. This is where the poem, and the book it would become part of, opened up for me. I was able to see the intersection between the rural, working-class Midwest, where I was raised by a single mother, and still life subject matter—bowls, fruit, kitchen implements. The undervalued realm of women’s work. I recognized that pie-seeking girl with her complicated yearning. Then with the volta, the plot of the poem shifts: “The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it. / Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers. / Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.” I notice, now, the verbs: pull, run, build, tear, suck, reach. Any-thing but still. She must reach in from the dark, break the illusion of the picture plane, build her own fire, and scorch her own bird. It’s not what she wants, but it’s what she has. Whatever beauty is, she must subsist on its marrow. I knew girls like her. I was and am a girl like her, as is my mother. Not unlike Eve, reaching across the threshold for the forbidden fruit.

The poem’s last sentence, “Art, useless as tits on a boar,” came to me with the surprise of a slap. “Useless as tits on a boar” was an idiom in my mom’s family, originating in her father’s barbershop in a village with a dirt main street. “You know Henry,” someone might say. “He’s useless as tits on a boar.” There it was—my mother’s voice and point of view. Her irony, her capacity for calling out the bullshit. A MON-STER WOMAN, of a kind. I loved the leap of calling art useless, even in the midst of an artful poem about art. The book that grew up around this first poem explores high art and low culture, the matriarchy of still life, the complexity of stillness. That life, despite its losses, is still life. The girl is less monstrous than MONSTER WOMAN, but just as much a trespasser. On Rembrandt, and Ginsberg, and the sonnet itself. Framed by the window, the painting’s frame, and the sonnet’s inimitable architecture, she looks. She hungers. She plunders and feeds herself.

—Diane Seuss

*

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry. Her most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021), winner of the PEN/Voelcker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press), received the Juniper Prize. Her sixth collection, Modern Poetry, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2024. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

__________________________________

From Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most, edited by Erin Belieu and Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2023. Available from Copper Canyon Press.

I just arrived home
Gaza [insert heart emoji]
I took my family to the beach
it was lovely

[insert no news from the US]
[insert news from
Electronic Intifada &
Al Jazeera]

I am shocked
Thank you for asking
[insert heart emoji]
I am at home

We just broke the siege [to]
Reaffirm our right to resist
Our right to exist

I am in Gaza
Gaza is strong
Gaza is suffering

Yes no electricity
but we still have power
generators
But soon we will be out
of electricity

I am in Gaza
We are fucked so far
But we will survive

I hope we will survive
The human being
is a dirty creature

I am not sure
if we will come out
of all this
alive
Let us see

I love you
For asking about me
Habibtee
[insert two heart emojis]

This is today
[insert picture of boy held
in his father’s arms
the boy dimples his secure]

I left the clothes
I left the house
I don’t know if I
[can/will] return
Because
they are talking about
a complete demolishing
of Gaza

Does the world know
the truth?
We have the right to do
what we have done
To end the occupation
To end the siege

At the end I love Gaza

I love my life here
We will build Gaza
again

Now as we speak
there is an attack
Very close
I can’t capture it
It is too dark

No place to go

Home is the safest place

There is no safe place

I can smell the bombing &
missile
powder

[insert audio of bombing]
[insert audio of footsteps
shifting glass and rubble]

They attack at night

I don’t think
those rallies will stop
what is going on
here

Hello World
[insert the story of
Ahamed Handala writing
from occupied Palestine
specifically, Gaza]

[insert story of two
children and a marriage]

[insert story of studies abroad
and return home to Gaza]

[insert story of a family displaced
in 1948 from Ashdod]

[insert story of a family falling
in love with Gaza]

What did they expect
from people living
under siege?

This is how we filled up
water today

[insert photo of people
with plastic buckets]

[insert video of a boy between
two walls & his father’s voice
saying: How are you? &
I love you in English &
murmuring endearments
in Arabic]

[insert video of
a father’s hand reaching
to press the cheeks
of a son]

There is no way to go
We have over eighty persons
in our family building
They came to Rafah
from Gaza City

I wish I can write
I want to write a post
for my university in the UK
and post it on LinkedIn

I am sitting with my family
Don’t worry

They are talking
about troop invasion
The warplanes are hovering
at a very low altitude

[insert video of 150,000 souls
marching in the streets of London]

I hope they can stop the
troop invasion

I am still awake
It is calm now
This is so strange
I don’t know what
is being cooked

[insert recipients
new iPhone dying
for 24 hours after last text]

[insert the bombing
of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital]

[insert reports of the dead]

[insert no reports of their names]

I washed after two days
It is a battle for survival
in a dystopian world

I am alive so far

[insert report of statements
of support but no support
from a Crown Prince]

I can’t think now too much
This is too much for me to think about

I am fine and my family is well
[insert heart emoji]

[insert well wishes from
the Pulitzer winning author
recently cancelled for saying
the word Palestine]

Thank you
Tell him we are strong!

[insert video of mass funeral
the people are shouting:
We are the people
We will not leave this land
until the last drop of our blood
is gone. We are going forward
with our resistance]

[insert social media post
about the speaker of this poem]

I love you [insert heart emoji]
I am speechless [insert heart emoji]
I love what you wrote [insert heart emoji]

Could you please remove the photo
of my family? [insert two heart emojis]

There is someone who commented
on your post about “civilians”
Does not this “civilian” know
that they are living in a colonial state
that oppresses people in another part?
Do they not know of the suffering
of the people of Gaza?
What do they expect
from those who are oppressed?
Are they ignorant?

This is my friend living close
to me    He was killed
along with his daughter & his wife

[insert photograph of a young man
his hair is slicked back &
he has black wire rimmed glasses &
he sports a neat beard. He is smiling.
It is a selfie]

Everything and everyone is
a target

Me too
I don’t trust
anyone

If you want to help
help Yahya
He is stuck &
his home was destroyed

I hope to stay here for long
Alhamdullah

I am so mad
This is insane

Habibtee
Thanks for asking

[insert video of buildings
exploding]

[insert image of buildings
exploding &
an arrow pointing down]

Can you see the explosion?
This is where I lived in Gaza City
Thankfully I evacuated the apartment
on the first day [insert sad face emoji]

I saw the Congress
So
They are not going to let
humanitarian aid in?

Hey

[insert pulsing heart emoji]

What supplies?
Nothing has entered yet
Even though there are so many
in need of them

[insert reports of shadow
blocking & censorship &
cancelled events & & &]

Yes yes I know
they want to block the truth
This is an existential battle for them
so they want to destroy everything

Inshallah
But this battle will go on

I feel we are in the end of our days

Every night they only kill children
[insert crying emoji]

Now they are attacking
another hospital

[insert text from the Director
of Al-Quds hospital announcing
orders to evacuate]

Now they are attacking nearby
as we speak
Please
see this

I used to hang out on that street I love Gaza
I miss Gaza City
[Insert crying emoji]
It has been two weeks

Inshallah [insert heart emoji]
They are attacking near
Rafah border

Fuck Egypt
Cowards
I swear a lot on my FB page
about Egypt
In another post I also said
Fuck you Rishi Sunak

A UN Peace-Keeping Force?
I was thinking about this
Gaza is the responsibility of Israel
[insert fact: an occupying force
is entrusted with safeguarding
a civilian population]
They consider Gaza as part
of the Palestinian Authority
though the Palestinian Authority
has no authority over Gaza
Egypt is complicit &
a UNPKF is between countries

It is just ink on papers

[insert photo of NYT announcing
a small load of aid from Russia]

Fuck them

We don’t need this stuff
It is not enough
For Gaza

[insert question about a word
the speaker of this poem used
to say when he stayed
in the home of the writer
of this poem. The filler-word
dragged out for the pauses between
two thoughts.]

Yani [insert smiling face emoji
with a drop of sweat]

I am living inside a crime
scene I smell only death

I just lost some of my friends
just now [insert sad face emoji]
My imam who taught me
the Quoran just got killed [
insert sad face emoji]

Inshallah I will survive
I believe everything
that has happened
is happening
and will happen
has already been written
in a big book by Allah

I am no longer afraid

 My nose is bleeding
Should I go see my Sex and the City doctor.
She’d be like, did you move here for a man or a job.
I’m walking in Midtown,
I’m like, good for you in your colorful outfit.
Sad for a sea of black.
I went to California with a youthful aching in my heart
and I left it there / didn’t.
My sister’s and my text relationship is so I do this, I do that.
I text her, I washed my new bra and it’s so tightI keep gasping for air in my cubicle.
She writes back, I fell asleep on the train
and when I woke up a spider was dangling in front of my eyes.

My cartoon world where I live with you.
Where I float across the ocean.
Where I miss my stop every day
but it doesn’t matter / girl power.
Sometimes I post the things in my head
onto the Internet for a certain few.
For those to whom I’m like “good for you,”
your pastel dress in a sea of black
Maybe I’m like, hungry.
Gluten free Oreos. Can’t hear myself think.
I’m listening to “Free Fallin'” on my Walkman.
I go into the grocery store and they’re playing it too.
Cause I forgot the line & Tom Petty reminded me.
I wanna fly down over Mulholland /
wanna collapse on the grocery store floor.
The universe told me to go into the grocery store
and buy just cookies and milk.
D would’ve called it a “heroic purchase.”
My therapist was like, maybe you’re not over it.
The taste of the milk bored my tongue.

I’m walking around the grocery store.
“Epic” by Faith No More.
I’m running on the treadmill listening to
Lady Gaga and thinking about my sister.
And my sister calls and leaves a message
that she was listening to Lady Gaga
on the treadmill and thinking of me.
I text her two girls and two crystal ball emojis.
What if D dies.
And I’m like, how could you not need poetry?
Walking home w/ my grocery bag on my arm,
it feels like a tourniquet.
Use my computer as an extension cord.
Exercise or sleep.
You emptied the laundry all over the bed
and I screamed like a bomb exploded.
All the things that I’m interested in.
Will I take a selfie at the end of the world.

______________________________

A previous version of this poem appeared in Blush Lit. Diary by Marisa Crawford is available via Spuyten Duyvil Press.

THE INTERVIEWER WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT FASHION

 “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked

 Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.

feels dangerous, and almost nothing like traveling to Saint-Rémy when my wife was expecting and beginning to show, her morning sickness lifting, to pass through Roman arches and chrome-yellow wheat fields beneath desiccated cypresses lining trails pocked with irises and blue mulberries where van Gogh painted through barred windows (omitting said bars), and eschewing the guided tour we indulged ourselves instead in the market square gorging on cheeses so slender the two of us even her despite her bulge; then zigzagging downhill into the grand allées between colonnades of sighing plane trees stretching in the straightaway across for the intimation murmuring from her body to mine: our child tumble-turning inside. How could we know what was waiting for us just around the bend? In the afternoon we pulled over to rest our eyes drowsy from the drive in a gravelly rest stop, shoulder to shoulder like effigies with our seats reclined and the windows wide, dandelions unfurling in a breeze.

Image courtesy of the author.

________________________

Excerpted from Survivor’s Notebook. Used with permission of the publisher, Acre Books. Copyright 2023 © by Dan O’Brien.

Midway or the midpoint of my life
I understood the need to decompress
There was never enough tenderness in texts
Storms rolled through every day for weeks
I drove through some of them

I drove through many strip malls on the way—it felt familiar
The sign said “window tinting” or “sunless tanning”
I drove through and forgot immediately
Along the way were many forms of tyranny
The mist rolled up the mountain as I drove

I rolled the window down and rolled it up again
I said, I can’t take you a mile down the road
It was because he was he, not because he was poor
She ate her oatmeal like a much older woman
She furrowed her brow but it could no longer be furrowed
Chemicals and plastics make such differences

Closets and cabinets etc. make such differences
Everybody wants to give me a china set
No one in this life wants a china set
Oh just set her up in a house
No you can’t even sell it

Oh I found us a red wooden house by a creek
I found us a white house with a vegetable garden already going strong
Oh I found us a kitchen of windows
I know I said I didn’t want to go outside ever again
No but I did

______________________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Upstate by Lindsay Turner, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Is it selfish to wish for more than to survive?
I see you, bare arms gleaming in the sun-

struck snow, I see the browned roast
you brought to your wine-stained lips

the stack of books you read, and those boots
that last fall you loved yourself in.

I see you in them again on this roll call
morning stroll through what intimate data

strangers tell me about their lives.
Once upon a time I asked them to

or they asked me, who can recall,
I’m into it, I guess. I like to watch,

at least, I can’t seem to stop, but I can’t
bear to share, so I’ll tell you here:

the cat finally came home last night—
spooked by so many fireworks barking,

he hid somewhere unsearchable for a while
no matter how I called and called.

He chose me, I like to say since the day
I found him starving on the porch.

I know the night is full of unsteady boats
on cold seas and horrible cages

and people far more alone than me
I’m sorry for your loss, your cancer,

the accident you had no way to see coming
and the one you did have an inkling of

I’ve learned how important it is to say
because of how difficult it is to say

and how loudly loneliness fills the silence
although, like anything, it depends—

for instance, I still can’t unhitch my breath
from even the softest whisper of your name.

__________________________________

From Dream Apartment by Lisa Olstein. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.