It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water. Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc of her shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock of treeline, the wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin, and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure: fugitives from dreams’ disasters. My beloved of nape, buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions, violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ, or zeitgeist, I cradle her in sleep’s long sail toward morning.
Heather Treseler is the author of Parturition (2020), which won a chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Cincinnati Review, The Irish Times, Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays appear in eight books about contemporary poetry as well as in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Boston Review. Her poem “Wildlife” was chosen by Spencer Reece for the W. B. Yeats Prize (2021) and her sequence “The Lucie Odes” was selected for The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize (2019). She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center.
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