with lines from Sappho, Bishop, and Oliver
Sometimes I forget my non-man hands—like can openers—
cut circles in the air. If the silence in each fingertip is hereditary.
If submersible. If for once / he’d get off his ass. If earth is a billionaire.
If all those bags of ice from the gas station melted. If birds. If wild
strawberries. If the dead dove in the garden. If it knew. Jane Doe.
If Jane Doe and a dove. If subtracted. Then multiplied. If what I am
saying expands like smoke next to the nasturtiums. If breath is a trap
with a rope and pile of leaves. If wind swooshes behind the bleachers.
If the poem I meant to write was a heart inside of a non-heart, like a circle
on scrap paper that my grandmother kept in her jewelry box and her twin
sister poured into a plastic baggy that’s in my closet under a heap
of scarves in case of a cold neck. If I wrap my head and leave it
on the kitchen counter. If out of the closet. If one outlives the other.
If Aunt Shirley remembers how to make a Manhattan. If I learn the opposite
of captured. If I see you at the train station in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
If I paused the movie. If it wasn’t you. If the gynecologist quit. If my spiritual disease.
If mushrooms. If in my ears. If in the absence. The Leaf and the cloud. If mothering.
North & South. If in other news. The radishes are ready to harvest. If we eat them.
If. It splattered like an egg on fire. If the glass bowl next to the apricots. If lovesick.
Burning and cutting. If Imitation. Naming. If it matters. If this. Then that. Then this again.
If sound and whales. What then, of water. Of boats.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Enda St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, Palette Poetry, The Colorado Review, Fourteen Hills, Los Angeles Review, as well as other journals and anthologies. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennslyvania.