Piety by Elizabeth Hutton


 

—so I called it, when I talked of reading
            and writing; of my doubt about assumed states of grace.
Still, it felt private, what letters could do.
 
Letters: so I called them. Married a decade;
           another still tethered
with long caution tape. My heart—how it follows me,
 
up in the dark. What did I call it, that night as I read this
           alone in the tub, alone, and then standing,
streaming from all places our water?

 
 
 

Lizzie Hutton’s first book of poetry, She’d Waited Millennia, was published in 2011 by New Issues Press. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Yale Review, Antioch Review and Interim, and garnered her the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in English and Education.