Four Poems

by Hilary Plum

From our hill

 A flare rising                below

in the passages this is light       like

light anyone could open a door

you were

not there                      having never

learned the difference between

camp and city              the difference

is there                         another hand

                                    I read

the newspaper was obscured

after a scrim the hue of flesh never

yours but preferred      as if night

were a room in which your long dream

of my flesh was housed            blinds

low                  night lasts                    not

a history           but a time you still

recognize, jasmine or rosemary, a peeling

back                 a quarry children

still swim in

Still wife

A triangle began

Car full of voters                      mountain nearly removed

In the foreground was I crying

Blue-green the algae                 emerging from each pierced

kernel of corn                         

Crying was still a position

into external spaces like the start

of a kettle’s screaming                         I’d long seen the mountain

there, where it was                               thing in window steam clouded

like salt seals the lid or salt                   bricks years up beneath

the mountain

Car steady on the tracks                       surface clogs the filter

meant I was there                                where you could see me

Car along the orthogonal

You could find me or assume my position

not sounding the opaque shape of pond

not signaling to a V of birds                 streaming through

an absence

someone was plummeting

And I, who have never seen a corpse

You keep

the name siege                         orchards of

systems theorized sweetness

they must                                 and weren’t

you                                          keeper of one

palmful of glistening near sanguine

seeds representing seeds of

pomegranate                            one pomegranate

in hand but                  released            kept an old image

like a face                     a map               animated

a bird through this ripe wind or

something like their whole heaped world

cauterized fruit as it                             as if

something to be said for                      describing

I                       did                   release

a tendril                       ground held

sap                   as memory

Excerpt from Harm Reduction

The librarian was shaking his head. This, he said—gesturing toward the book I’d selected—would never shake the UN.

 

I was starting to remember I’d written the book. Things were coming into focus, like the white etched in an ultrasound becoming a hungering mouth. The library was more like a dairy that’s overproduced, valves blasting milk into sewers.

 

One last time I buttoned my blouse. The ceiling was dreamy and arched, made wholly of glass. After the last war there’d been a rush on transparency. The books had already been catalogued. I’d once believed my own had been spared.

 

If you were anywhere else, your view, like an egg cracked on the new dome of the city, was just commentary. I knew the feeling, like the dry heat of the professor’s hands hovering over the one text I’d read. I thought my neck would smell fresh as a multilith, young and Xeroxed. He had to tell me the war had already begun.

 

The library was a quiet place to say the Red Cross was denied access to the camp. There was a sort of drumbeat and there you go, troops in the protectorate. I felt it all in my ribcage when she was awake. Her face soft as any book. I saw her only when the machine was deployed.

 

One last time I filled my lungs, like pouring concrete into the ditch of her presence. I would see the librarian at his second job. He knew what he’d do if anything happened to us.

After a few years I found a message you’d left: I am by the baggage claim. I can’t see you.

 

What if your invitation was meant for the afterlife?

 

Our breath was growing short, as if we were walking over the place our forebears had dug the swale. For technical reasons our candidate’s name remained on the ballot.

 

Every car will stop running. Clotheslines are taut above unrepentant violets.

 

I always knew which day in the cycle.

 

It’s not that I needed the airport to stay open. Or the sheen of tape film between my bluing fingers. I wished there were still a place to not need to speak of you. Only you could hear my voice there, a long storm of hello.

Without a camera I’d have been out of place. I preferred rooftop bars but this was a church basement.

 

The more you drink, I was saying, the less is left for the troops. Another pour headed my way, sounding just like a soldier pissing on the curve of my boot.

 

In a generic offering plate I saw my bare torso reflected. I could have dug deeper if asked. The bills heaped up.

 

When the teardrop hit the nipple, I hit send.

 

Without the strike we wouldn’t have had the strike. I wouldn’t have heard you say, I only speak for myself.

 

Your hand was no bigger than mine. Then the white type of end credits, like white phosphorus filling the tunnel. I thought it would be easier. Coming back up the ink was no faster. Say you were not in your accent speaking. No one agrees on the end of the story. No one still here.


Hilary Plum is the author of five books of poetry and prose, most recently Excisions, a volume of poetry (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Hole Studies, an essay collection (Fonograf, 2022). With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. She teaches at Cleveland State University and serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. www.hilaryplum.com.

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