In the sick dream a wan globe’s dull light pries
through a slit at the edge of the curtain
queering the cruelness of the world you exist as
the square root of while I rehearse
the performance of mourning wherein
the other heart inside me stills and we
are left to rot. As those threats crest there
still, you, little comma, hang
paused in your damp sack I grow like a shadow,
quieting. I search for you in the stillness, percussing
no longer, turning my bowed edges over
and over as a tide laps outside at the cliff’s
stiff bounds, dulling them to nubs whose
shallow grooves shadow their grit
skins like veins, sunburst, bluing
beneath each yours and mine, growing fat
with blood, while my husband sleeps sated
in his clarity, heaving through the calm dark
he dreams of no such worries through.
What must it feel like to not sense a coming
severance like this one. Beyond each edge
of your existence I’ve ached, devoted as the man
who with the bones of four thousand monks built
arches, altars, sacral chandeliers in a holy city
wracked by war, by empire, the barrier between
us in places just a single cell thick, meaning
maniacal. I tongue a seed fattening with spit
in my mouth and sense you a selfsame germ
broadening into more of what you already are:
paddles for hands that will split the webs
they’ve spun from, young tongue, lung
to yet know air, the tail you’ll soon fill out,
fused lids not yet half-mast to let
light in. It will be dark a long time
in the silo. Tell me the way the fig splits open
sounds like you arriving. I miss you
before you exist in this place
that does not deserve you.
Caitlin Roach’s poems appear or are forthcoming in jubilat, Narrative, Tin House, Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Columbia Journal, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. More can be found at caitlinroach.com.