Avail by Julie Marie Wade


 
 

If the poem could stop writing itself, it would.
Ageless perpetua, carbon to stone,
lead and the softer metals.
I put jade in the door, to prop it open,
but the keyhole is hungry and swallows my treasures whole.
Inside is a room
with cylindrical walls and a ceiling occasionally shaken.
Mine.      Erasure.      Ours.
Under your feet a new callus forms.
My fingers relinquish: hard water, phosphorous bones.
Together we thresh the roses.

 
 
 

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including the recently released Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems and the forthcoming The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, co-authored with Denise Duhamel. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami.