You wanted at least three showers, two oceans—
and a pool to watch anemones devour jellyfish.
Listen, I’d love to stay, but I’ve disremembered my accessories.
Here’s a mermaid’s purse, for when you find them.
Turkey-lettuce wrap, eye mask, Kant?
Hegel. I was thinking,
in the living room: Everything goes wrong
at the water’s surface. The cold plane
theoretically
bearable.
You might even test it with your fingertips.
But then the wave . . .
And I lurch back into my skin.
Why is it always the season for treading water?
We could ask an epoch. Acanthus ate
the atrium, but the balcony presents
a fine view of continental drift—
Through here? Wait. The kitchen’s only mirrors?
God, you must be tired of thin women.
Some bodies run more to palimpsest than others.
If you drip the faucet, you’ll taste a thousand ways
to name a mountain.
When I was young, I wanted
to pry mica out of rock, carry it home.
All that shining trapped, like ice.
You must sympathize with comets.
I too maintain a highly eccentric orbit. I used to sleep
with Astronaut Barbie, you know. Every cutting board
on her clipper ship covered in her conjectures.
Baryon asymmetries, conformal bootstrap theory,
unknots. Chalk dust thick as seal fat underfoot.
And yet you left the velvet silence.
Anxiety is another cosmic microwave background,
overlooked.
She couldn’t abide my blue glow, my creaking hammock.
I assume the attic comes with a ghost?
The cellar too. And each bedroom holds its mare.
Every home needs an organizing principle.
I’d prefer an animating question.
Do you ever wake before the lark turns warm enough to sing?
Not exactly.
This much sun would burn roses
to tea-stained paper.
Letters you meant to write?
I would devise the rain:
rhinestone ladders,
new angles for light to climb—
but already I’m a shore marooned,
impossible to reach.
And in the greenhouse clocks grow unruly.
CAROLYN OLIVER is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is a 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her website is carolynoliver.net.
BRITNIE WALSTON is a versatile artist, creating energy through light and vibrant colors. She captures the beauty of nature, blending boundaries between reality and abstraction. This creates a unique dreamscape atmosphere, providing viewers with a multilayered and immersive visual experience. Britnie graduated from Goucher College as a fine and performing arts scholar and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art. While in college, she also studied art and Greek mythology abroad in Greece with the University of Maryland College Park. Her art is published in Carolina Quarterly, Cutbank, and Denver Quarterly. She is also forthcoming in So To Speak.
