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.