I who am apt to get tearful about any instance, fictional or real, of loyal love that defies time or defies prudent self-interest or defies embarrassment or the pressure of social convention, I am probably one sort of person whose visible emotion made Dickinson narrow her fathoming eyes – Dickinson who knew that what matters is severely apt to be secret and private. A noisy despair is not despair, she says, and she implies that my wet eyes are actually wet with relief at not living in the heart of crisis;
and I intend to be educated by Emily – and by life – though not too fast, not too soon.
Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. His seventh book of poems, Losers Dream On, appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press.
Two Poems
Lauren Hilger
State fair
I believe in the game and win the Tamagotchi. In my hand, it has a pulse or a beat, sort of alive. I feed it lollipops, jelly hearts. It moves like a diaphanous creature, like a complicated multicellular organism, an extension of me. Against the wall of the Gravitron, I keep one leg down, one leg held in a standing split. Mass up, Velocity down, relative rates at which the constant pressure holds me in place. It’s childish and deserves a blue ribbon. I am scared of the ones that spin, the rides that sling you inside yourself, the pirate ship held aloft by a cable that sifts in two directions so you’re falling both ways. The hammer, its required strength, that asks are you external? Do you really only exist here? Saved nowhere else. Sun sets. Look twice nothing’s there. I stand in line as if I were tall. Lick the side of a lemonade for water, to say I swallow nothing. But there it is, that hot metal horse under me, that ride I pay for, that circle I make heavy. In gymnastics, all kinetic potential, I run a full length of the floor and then stop right before, my body keeps going, my skin burns the mats from face to ankle, broken vessels. I ate dirt, we said. All that rugburn. I had stopped myself from being thrown across the room. It came out anyway.
“Diadems—drop—”
The place has carved out my sleep. I walk it every night.
When I moved here, there were old sounds, a sputtering meter at the end of a cab ride,
back of the ferry, its engine like the low-end keys of a baby grand,
like a whale, centuries away.
Then too I believed the beauty of things I didn’t have,
an evening shrug, light blue, dark red stained-glass windows, staged and elaborate.
the noun <<cicatrice>>, that sounds more like it,
the citron glow of a scar, still there, the sour of the word,
the softness of the word ruins, the softness of inward ruins,
my signature.
We still measure how long we will live.
A sweetened charge of color if you unfocus.
But I could lengthen always into this.
Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.
