“JANUARY” AND OTHER POEMS
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JANUARY
I am too much in my body.
Mornings spent wishing for optical science and invisibility cloaks.
I dream of being pregnant again, even as I sweat through next-stage
luster.
The iced-over lake makes me miss something. Maybe the transparency
of water, the surprise of it having shadow.
My 84-year-old mother agrees to let me take her picture in front of the sign for
84 Lumber.
I need a heavy project to withstand a squall line.
The dog sits patiently in the snow. He wags his tail in it.
Patterns in the ice like enthusiastic errors.
I can’t understand why iamb doesn’t sound like the metrical foot it represents.
I am, I say, and my breath condenses.
ALTERNATE
Where antlers shake free the moose. Where
corals reproduce
quickly. Luminous mosses glow inward and
invisibly, waves
dictate the moon’s undulation. Touch the
beating elephant heart
without wearing gloves. Inside each nesting
doll, a larger doll.
Cordoning is obsolete, as is bulk upheaval.
Deep-sea brine pools into polar sanctuaries.
Cursed are those who mourn.
The dead are still alive.
POD
"It’s as if placing a boundary in-between people has actually removed a boundary" – Paul, Love is Blind, Season 4
Love is patient, love is kind
of like when an aquarium octopus escapes to find another
octopus obstructing the drain pipe. My grandfather who glued
his eye to the circus tent’s striped canvas to view a woman
removing her stockings was more smitten with the lines
of limitation. Any relatively narrow causeway
and my imagination swells like the waves
the concrete keeps me from. The clasp
of my bra has been both polished door knocker and impediment
to horn-mad fingers. I have watched an invisible wall become
more believable when the mime took advantage of a fixed point, keeping
one hand motionless, unlike the full body swaying that happens in
slow dancing. This was years ago, on the streets
of Paris. If God were to rend my veil, well,
I would probably hate it.
THE THIRTEENTH GUEST
I’m talking with you more now than when you were here.
12 months in a year, a single day made up of two 12-hour blocks,
time compartmentalized into even stops and starts like benignant
edits to a hackneyed personal statement. My student emails back,
My counselor thinks it shows too much privilege to admit I hike
the Alps every summer, I’m thinking, Go ahead then, change it
to a single Alp, the world obsessed with revision, luck, the way I care
more about what one relative crossed out in her sympathy card
than the actual visible sentiment. God, I hated how you voted, vice
versa, you never understood how I saw the shape of mid-morning light
through the window, quiet conspirator, your ideology like the heirloom
staff of a butter churn, every Thanksgiving that you carved the bird
was as if I rolled in late for supper, unleavened gospel, left-wing attitude.
Alicia Rebecca Myers’s poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets (2015, 2021, 2023), december, Creative Nonfiction, FIELD, Gulf Coast, SWWIM, The Rumpus, and Threadcount. Her first full-length manuscript, Warble, was a finalist for the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize, and her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series. She lives with her husband and son in upstate NY. You can access her website here.