"AND ALSO WITH YOU"
for Lauren
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I follow your lead: rise when you rise, open
the hymnal, watch when the priest smudges your forehead with ashes. It’s a day you love, your heart setting out into thickets of restraint. When we turn to our neighbors and hold their hands ― dry, cool, or frail — I’m shocked by the casual intimacy. It’s like coming out of the earth, this thawing earth, where I spent all winter weeping, weeping, weeping. Our Uber takes us back to town while I look out the window in my distracted way. Before opening the door, I kiss your warm cheek. You ask where we’ll have gimlets later. |
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SILVER MILLENNIUM
Scientists predict plastic, nuclear fallout, and chicken bones
will be humanity’s legacy on Earth. Why a girl
might live on the moon.
A prince and princess fell in love on the moon.
Ice skating near grand boulevards where water poured
from scalloped bowls.
A sword. A mirror. A jewel. Things on her bureau. Things
which might lead to an end.
Now,
on Earth you wash your child
with rationed bottled water.
Take a swig. Then your partner.
The moon in the sky like smoke.
What’s left must be split between you.
will be humanity’s legacy on Earth. Why a girl
might live on the moon.
A prince and princess fell in love on the moon.
Ice skating near grand boulevards where water poured
from scalloped bowls.
A sword. A mirror. A jewel. Things on her bureau. Things
which might lead to an end.
Now,
on Earth you wash your child
with rationed bottled water.
Take a swig. Then your partner.
The moon in the sky like smoke.
What’s left must be split between you.
Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). A Cave Canem fellow, his work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, Nimrod, and other anthologies and publications. He was a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Sarah Malakoff’s large-scale color photographs are examinations of the home as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. She has had solo exhibitions at Camerawork Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; The Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Vermont; the Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts; and Plane Space in New York, New York. She received 2001 and 2011 Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2011 Fellowship from the SMFA, Boston. A monograph, Sarah Malakoff: Second Nature, was published by Charta Art Books in 2013. She is an Assistant Professor at UMass Dartmouth and her work can be seen at www.sarahmalakoff.com.