We Have Tried To Be From Here, But We Cannot
Listen to the Poem
Despite all the fantasy
Iowa was just an interstate
coated in ice. 16-wheelers
abandoned in fields, unearthly
sparkle of 24-hour
gas-stations on a moonless
December night.
The span is not just the iced-wheat
past the windbreak, it is not just
the grid-work roads dropped
by rulers across the flat,
not box houses behind the lone tree,
but how white
is the fuel of a cold
sky; and a little hopping
bird somehow left behind,
amid ripped magazines, near
an empty vodka bottle, lays
frozen in the drainpipe.
There will be more snow on Tuesday.
It will get colder by Sunday afternoon.
We will hold up our soup bowls. Identify tracks
in the snow: here bird. Here rabbit. This: dog.
The cold means we search. It means we are leaving.
It means we are growing old together. It is not even a dream.
We do not live upstairs, but we hear
the footsteps and the trains come
and go like wind. At first they rattle
you, but soon they are less
than noon bells, soon they are
just shadows doomed to return
in time, like us, to where
we are not from, again.
In our daughter’s bedroom water freezes
on the nightstand. Perhaps she will not
mind how we moved her from house
to house, she will find comfort in things
emptied, in the last sweep with an old
broom, final click of the latch, in the white
expanse beyond her brittle with possibility.
- Shana Youngdahl is the author of History, Advice and Other Half-Truths (forthcoming Stephen F. Austin State University Press 2012) and the chapbooks Donner: A Passing (Finishing Line 2008) and Of Nets (Gendun 2010). Her poetry has appeared widely in journals including Third Coast, Shenandoah and Margie.
December 30
Listen to the Poem
I’ve written you plotting and plodding,
sweet one. I say this is now.
You are key, lock, bed clothes
pulled off. I am a register
you sing in. How is it love’s
consequence has been so light?
I’ve written you sundry and careless,
a catapult of windchime.
I sometimes think of us as forgetful
and only remembering each other
like claustrophobes wanting the dense
space of football fields, the silver
scaled seats of empty stadium.
Or deep
in the night’s
sorrow, when you hear me
breathing, we are one
continent. You found a scrap of paper
with Cormac McCarthy #5
scrawled on it and wondered
what I meant, and you wanted to get it
so bad. You wanted Cormac McCarthy #5
to mean something prayerlike and rood,
something heard in a blood text
falling from the sky like a Leonid.
I’m telling you, and I’m telling you
it doesn’t mean anything and it
does, sewn in my hem, published
inconsequentially, as love sometimes is.
- Lindsay Illich’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Clare Literary Journal, Dos Passos Review, Hurricane Blues: How Katrina and Rita Ravaged a Nation, The Mom Egg, Rio Grande Review, Sojourn, Coachella Review, The Buddhist Poetry Review, and Texas Poetry Journal. Currently, Illich teaches writing at Curry College in Milton, MA.
As the Men Sleep
after Jeffrey Skinner’s “As the Women Sleep”
Listen to the Poem
It’s just coyotes and me
awake at this hour.
The faucet drips. A winter
so cold I’m losing sleep.
Vanilla vodka—cheap,
don’t even bother with a glass.
The bottle’s rigid lip,
the sick-sweet burn and swallow.
Up all night, I write a little.
I’ll tell them I wrote a lot.
I smoke too, as they sleep—
clove cigarette, its black length
between fingers, its sweet
smoke sucked up through the vent
over the stove. No one
mentions they smell it
each morning over
pancakes and sausages.
No one mentions
the summer, the nights
I spent love-blitzed,
smoking cloves by the lake
with my so-called mistake.
The boys sit by the fire
with their father.
I find my warmth in guilt,
in a memory.
These are the smells
that see me through
till spring: cedar Christmas
tree we chopped down
with a broken ax,
the pine tar soap
on his hardworking hands,
the man I married—
smell of my days.
Fistful of hair
I pull around
to my nose all day,
the smoke still strong—
smell of my nights.
The men breathe
like machines
in their rooms—
their engines run
on the fumes of my loneliness.
Space heaters buzz—
some kind of love,
something steady
in the quickening
light, in my deepest season.
- Heather Foster lives on a farm in Tennessee with her husband, kids, and Ozzy, the heavy metal rooster. She’s an MFA candidate in poetry at Murray State University. Her writing is featured or forthcoming in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Anderbo, South Dakota Review, Cutthroat, Superstition Review, and Country Dog Review.
