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a daughter drafts a letter from earth: departure

 ​​Dear ____________,
 
              What repair. What weather system permitting
           mourning, some music, the hollowbody
                                               dress of a loved one. What worry I do nothing 
 
              humbly—dream the branches of your blood
                           lines as sunprint—. Feel creased as—.
                       What touch I’ve nailed to me I’ve nailed to me
                                               instead of all these cliff swallows. Their mud nests 
 
              suffocating the eaves. What refusal
                                                            to see ourselves to sleep until we rinse
                                   our feet—. Until someone has tied red threads
around my ankle to ward off a new year. In the field-dark
 
               the storm hovers, the cows sound
a riled sadness. What heat
                        lightning rising. Reverberant sky.
 
                                                  I am radioing from myself
                                  to myself. Endless desert
                                                             where I thought a drop-dead 
               winter should be. Some nights this
 
is all I can do to keep from—. I drink myself into a threat
                        to sleep off my dress
                                    by morning. What static electricity when we’re still
 
            in the eye of it. Thunder slow-dilating
                                                 overhead like a train whistle. The lake swallowing 
 
                         the thrill of lightning lines.
                                                           My only desire a desire to touch
                                                 —no one—for a year. Let the storm drag me
               bodyless into the hush of long grasses,
 
                                             fields brushed with sage, wait for someone
                          more remorseful—to pass through. —I’m leaving
with the perfume rising off my hair, two children
             asleep in their nests.   
Picture
Eugène Carrière. The Contemplator, 1901. Oil on fabric. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cori A. Winrock’s book, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for the 2018 Alice James Books Prize and is forthcoming. She is the winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Best New Poets anthology, West Branch, Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, This Coalition of Bones, received the Freund Prize for a first collection. Winrock is currently a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Utah where she is a Steffensen Cannon Fellow. 
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