Poetry by Emma Aylor
Winter Letter
I trimmed the wick
to my kitchen table candle
too tight, close to clip.
It was almost sweet,
darkened cotton
just peeping from the wax:
fencepost buried
in sweeps of field snow.
When I try to light
it barely catches to
little pulse, blue knot
surrounded by ash bones
of matches — proof
that I tried — then goes out.
Tonight I think of what I’ll do
when we scatter. Who will talk
about the body in motion
and monstrous, the body
dressed and blue.
Morning after this
waking early to snow slit
by a road blurred and dark,
crescent moon hooked
like an earring through a tree.
But I can never remember
the true names for things
for Jasmine and Jordyn
Summer Letter
Every year it’s less possible to stay unmoved.
This isn’t a part of aging anyone had told me, return
to the kind of finding I practiced as a girl:
because this happened next to this, it means.
I prayed and he lived. I prayed and she died.
At breakfast, the espresso spoon is a copper
that shelters the terra-cotta of a friend’s coat;
I wear another’s perfume, amber, wood, and catch it
to think of her — for there she was, though she wasn’t.
I take home a used book of wildflowers in color to find
that the pictures were made where I grew up,
on the Blue Ridge Parkway and into Shenandoah,
three thousand miles from here, the year
my mother was five, the year my father was twenty-two.
It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not: still, at this,
little lights spindle out at my skin, pale yellow
like witch-hazel in autumn, coolly burst,
petals erratic as lemon shavings to the hand
as the leaves around deepen, tarnish, and fall.
There are those who believe, the book says,
we can witch valuables by the proper use of the plant.
By the proper use of the world we press
on all the worlds under it, and know them.
He slides his hand up my shin and there’s the bump
from the pipe I ran into in the dark, new moon
in Orkney, stumbling as I gaped at an aurora so faint
it felt more like gray veins of memory ebbing there,
at flutter, carrying beat blood back to the heart —
a year and a half ago now, though I don’t see it passing.
Emma Aylor‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Arcturus 