Rachel Mennies

June 30, 2016

The love poets say suffering is relative, but would they pull a plane whole from the sky?

I would pull a plane whole from the sky for you if you asked me to.

I would tell each new orphan look at the love your loss makes possible.

I would tell each grieving mother suffering is relative.

Each plane window yields only one small corner of the sky.

I will take the plane from the air for you and smash it on my tongue.

I will sing to you about each one of the lost: delivering them to you as you best prefer, with my
mouth.

I will sing east in the direction of your body until it moves west. I will sing west in the direc-
tion of your body until it moves south.

I sit here singing with their bones in my teeth waiting for your reply.

January 15, 2017

What discoveries I have made awake in the dark, what joyless shapes I have counted
there.

Those nights I would descend the stairs in a single leap and sit bare-shouldered on my stoop
in the biting winter.

I would hold my head in the frozen air until the fog arrived.

(One night a neighbor even joined me—are you a smoker, too he asked, his cigarette the
only light between us—does your wife make you come out here and freeze, too—and I
wept later in the empty room—)

What warm silence I have found here alone in the morning.

Olds calls it the stillness of the quiet skirts of the dark, on the ground.

I reach for the light cautiously—a gift meant for another left at my cold door.

A new lover unsure where to touch first, who learns the dawn air as she reaches.

But Naomi, last night I slept.

I disappeared from my body and returned, somehow, only when I was ready.

Have you brought me this impossible peace?

If you have, you mustn’t tell me—or else you mustn’t leave me—