Monday, April 1, 2024

Lea Graham : Two poems

 

 

 

January 16, 2024

          your face in the evening schools of longing
                               --Audre Lorde

 

These are not
“mornings of
wish and ripen.”

I wake to dishes
undone. How to say
torpor, gray, try
in one thousand ways?

You are still
upstairs in
imagination

your mind rowing
along the shore of to-do,
checking the trotlines
of here, now

Three hundred sixty-five
days you are gone:
Awe-filled, common

How the world
goes without
answer, its terrible
movement

 

 

Notes:

          After Jean Valentine

 

When we were first together,
over 1,000 miles apart,
you counted our emails—
356 if I remember right

That was before our smoking
deck in the happy house,
the pelicans in parliament
beyond the lagoon

I find your notes in green
and orange marker
willy-nilly in drawers,
books, ghostly traces
on your pants you used
like a page.

It’s the grave where I find you

 

 

 

 

Lea Graham is a writer, editor, critic and translator who lives in Hyde Park, New York. She is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), a fine press book and three chapbooks. Recently, she edited the anthology of critical essays: From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2022).