Molly Sutton Kiefer: “She Writes to Her Husband”

SHE WRITES TO HER HUSBAND

These are the things that have stayed: the ladybird

beetle on our bathroom sink; it hasn’t left

that spot for months. The story of sounds

in the woods, the ones that kept our daughter awake

when we’d finally gotten her to sleep

in her own room. There’s more of that now.

More wind gusts, more of the loneliness

that comes out like a song, the animals we’d never

thought we see evidence of are now staking the yard.

Beyond their ghost-voices in the bluff, that is.

We always heard that. In our twin galaxy, the one

across the universe, where every time we make

a decision, the opposite is made

there, you didn’t walk away. You kept your hand

inside of mine, and we faced it together, though what it is,

we only knew in that twin, the one all mashed up

against the windowpane, knowing what to call it,

where everything stopped but the sky’s jagged scar

cracked open.

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay Nestuary (Ricochet Editions). She has published three poetry chapbooks, and has work in Orion, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Fiddlehead Review, Ecotone, South Dakota Review, and The Collagist, among others. She is publisher at Tinderbox Editions and founder of Tinderbox Poetry Journal.

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