To Walt Whitman on “Gratitude”
Through me many long dumb voices,
—Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 24, line 15
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
—Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 44, lines 37-8
Rocking not in your cradle, nights
my teen mother folded me in a card-
board box—oblong, perishable in pleats
of an Indian blanket. Days old, I slept under
a jug of kerosene lit first by alcohol
denatured drawn from the spirit
cup. My boy-father struck vapors
off the wick from his diamond
match. I never cried much, they said,
firstborn, my mother’s nipples too young
and empty. Nights, jars of piss
lined the windowsill, the dog
howling sleep. I was a troubled draft,
sick in a cloud of gas and dust—
not as beautiful as your nebula
cohering. Instead, bronchial puffs
bewitched the kitchen, hand-rolled zig-
zags stuffed with Prince Albert
slow-burned. I lived in a secondhand haze
of a fisherman’s village, the first breath
of your degraded class, your dumbed—
only through you spoke. I have grown
now, queer, my face pressed into
the sidewalk by a cop’s boot in Bangor,
my soul first stolen by Nazarenes
their hope to save it by a hundred hands
laid-on in Belfast, my body abducted
by a perp in Memphis, who would be the one,
he said, to make the difference. Yes,
I was born of your degraded. Regardless, I turn
your voice down. I can assure my wounds
are in order. I live by them even as I write
this, clotted in constellation, light-
years dotting the dark field, the same universe
we brother, I linger you unbearded. Still,
I cannot be your blade
of grass, nor your delight, or fall
for the hero’s hubris these moronic ears
can’t help but hear. I must decline. I admit
I still hide below corrugated flaps,
my ceiling alternating a checker weave,
sometimes lost in pea fog, tongue
tied, throat-bolted, my soul in a shadow
box, the box this proud body carries.
Rosa Lane is author of Called Back (Tupelo Press, 2024), winner of the 2025 Maine Literary Book Award. Entitled the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Called Back is a sequence of poems in queer conversation with Dickinson. Lane is also author of three other poetry collections including Chouteau’s Chalk, winner, Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2019); Tiller North, winner, National Indie Excellence Award (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016]; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook. Her most recent work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected as finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Cork, Ireland) among other awards. Lane’s poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Five Points, Nimrod, RHINO, Third Coast, and elsewhere.