Stateside (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Poems
Find and share the perfect poems.
More by this poet
Before the Deployment
He kisses me before he goes. While I, still dozing, half-asleep, laugh and rub my face against the sueded surface of the sheets, thinking it’s him I touch, his skin beneath my hands, my body curving in to meet his body there. I never hear him leave. But I believe he shuts the bedroom door, as though unsure if he should change his mind, pull off his boots, crawl beneath the blankets left behind, his hand a heat against my breast, our heart rates slowing into rest.
2010
The Long Deployment
For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet and pillow. I lift a blanket to my face. There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet, like sandalwood left sitting in the heat or cardamom rubbed on a piece of lace. For weeks, I breathe his body. In the sheet I smell anise, the musk that we secrete with longing, leather and moss. I find a trace of bitter incense paired with something sweet.
2013
Sun Salutations with Betrayal and Departure
Although this room is full of moving, sweating people—all of us lunging forward or folding ourselves in tangled shapes, obedient to Sanksrit names we’re told mean “mountain,” “plank,” “dog”— downward facing, I feel a sudden anger. After, I talk with a woman. For years I’ve called her a friend. We lean damp against the mirror. If there were a Sanskrit name for what I am to her, it would be following flower, the loyalty of a blossom that opens beside its colleague on the branch. We talk of our work. And I sense, the way spines know the limits of their curvature, that she has lied to me.
2017