Winner of the 2023 Foster Poetry Prize
Reciprocity says let me love you and I’ll let you love me. I’ll taste your criticisms so long as
you’ll lick my praises. Or maybe I say there is no reciprocity in love. The sun has a smell
you know, and land is not ours to possess. The land needs Shabbat. Does your writing feel still?
Plath said growing hurts at first. In the classroom, truth has become something à la Kierkegaard.
At home, sex—a delectable expression of love. So I turn myself into a body. Just outside of
language the dog sits, staring, and you say look, she holds the world’s sadness in her eyes.
Tuesday. Love is an ethic. I take you in. I say we are running out of water. You say we’re
running out of time. What company will we keep when all hearts are dry? Either way we won’t
have any money. What treasures we miss, so focused on the future. Time, here, does not exist
until we make it, settling around us in time-marked debris. I learned this from Ocean. The
debris of life. We’re making it now. Don’t do anything out of guilt, my mother often repeats.
Only men have fought me on this. Desire is not logical, and I suppose you made me
want to love you. It’s the small ways we listen to each other that can stop time. Which you
sometimes interpret as: stop. The crocuses are in bloom again. Have we successfully separated
want and need like we have mind and body? This dyad is an incomplete expression of us. We are
all too contradictory. We are more assemblage than singular. Multifarious and many. I am
figuring out the yin and yang of me—of us. The desire contra-addiction. I arm myself with
theory to excavate this schism. It becomes a problem of terminology. Grief work: to blow the
dust off the flawed instrument of memory, it is time to eat the pains. Digest to dissolve of them.
Tell me again how you got here? And how don’t you feel? Like languages, we meet in
translation, become bruised by grammar, paper cut into syntax. This is also reverence. This is
also resignation. So I let myself walk into the season of my life. How settled into personhood are
you? I answer not well, absorbing the news from the Western periphery of time. How inadequate
this new language, reducing horror to word counts and reels. I lie down on the ground to combat
the all-at-onceness of algorithms. There is already so much to think about in one given fraction
of time. Don’t expect too much of me, you say, to which I reply I only expect the world.
