One Star, and the Full Moon Rising
by Ann Fisher-Wirth
The whole time here
I have been writing a poem to you
but it doesn’t have words
It’s part of the air
the snow on the mountains
the cold ocean
It’s how I move through the day thinking of you
and give a shiver or wriggle
when you tell me you are naked
that you answered the phone
fresh from sleep
or just out of the bath
and I want to curve up
next to your hot skin and feel
the weight of your body
The whole time here
I have been marrying you
over and over
I have been writing a poem to you
but it doesn’t have words
It’s part of the air
the snow on the mountains
the cold ocean
It’s how I move through the day thinking of you
and give a shiver or wriggle
when you tell me you are naked
that you answered the phone
fresh from sleep
or just out of the bath
and I want to curve up
next to your hot skin and feel
the weight of your body
The whole time here
I have been marrying you
over and over
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poetry is Paradise Is Jagged. With Laura-Gray Street she is coediting Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (forthcoming 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and elsewhere. She has received several awards for her poetry, among them the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi. Her current book project is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, a poetry/photography project with Wilfried Raussert, with translations of the poems into Spanish by the 4W/Women in Translation collective