she did this voice
after Rosmarie Waldrop
The complexity, I say, page to flesh. The things we do for architecture. Housing the
language; the floor of the text. I meant to say curtains, missing each other when
they’re apart.
The pages separated, she says. You’re comforted by the way the turning marks
time. You can imagine an existence, is to was. The thing watched and the
watching. The object of the sentence about your affection. The poetry that lying is.
Being in love like being something other, I say. The thing I was before this drink. The
rust within our bodies I’ve now placed under my tongue. A mind steeped in refusal.
The undoing we perform.
The longer the look the deeper the hole, she reads. My exponential fear in the
deciphering. I am grown in carelessness. Blinded by mobility, I am the moment
between the blinks of the turning signal.
What I can’t worry into existence, I say, I find in the blur between us. Our outlines
magnified by the lies we project. And when I say your name, what kind of
permission am I giving?
Layers of glass, she says, the effort of the light to fluctuate. Anything unclear
belongs to the future; things obscured by dark unfold outwards in time. Whose
responsibility is this ambiguity? In important ways, I salt the earth with my shadow. I
am the places my body has been.
Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship. Her second chapbook, Peach Woman, will be published late 2020. She won Columbia Journal’s 2019 Fall Poetry Contest, judged by Monica Sok, and her work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, the Vassar Review, Quarterly West, The Pinch Journal, Hold: A Journal, and Windfall Room, among others. Hunerwadel holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born and raised in the deep south, she works as a book designer and science writer in Western Massachusetts.
