Anniversary, January 2021
by Erin Elizabeth Smith
“you move slowly out of my bed
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.”
-Audre Lorde
In the blue-purple light of the near dark,
I watch you lift our cat from the maple,
place her on the deck where she bounds
into the ghostly riverweed.
There, lit against a type of ending,
I reach to touch you again, a thing I cannot
stop doing. It’s been a year without
anyone but you in our home, a year of holding
only you, only you in the kitchen, in the living room,
in our bedroom where the cat leaps
onto the sheets with a throaty mew
to say she is also a part of this absence,
this year of lost time, stories untold
in their folded maps. Some days I watch
a round of robins gather by the pond,
and think it will be alright, this missing things,
this swamp of time. Others, I stare
into a middle distance unable to move
except for the pull of bourbon to my lip.
When someone asks what I’ve done
with this wasted year, I want to say
I’ve learned so much—how to sew,
the names of cresses, that meaty bite
of puffball cooked in soy—
but all I know is the way your hand between
my shoulderblades makes my skin
ripple like clothes on a line,
how despite this long winter
watching you call for the cat to come in
fills me with so much warmth
even as we shut our door to its world.
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.”
-Audre Lorde
In the blue-purple light of the near dark,
I watch you lift our cat from the maple,
place her on the deck where she bounds
into the ghostly riverweed.
There, lit against a type of ending,
I reach to touch you again, a thing I cannot
stop doing. It’s been a year without
anyone but you in our home, a year of holding
only you, only you in the kitchen, in the living room,
in our bedroom where the cat leaps
onto the sheets with a throaty mew
to say she is also a part of this absence,
this year of lost time, stories untold
in their folded maps. Some days I watch
a round of robins gather by the pond,
and think it will be alright, this missing things,
this swamp of time. Others, I stare
into a middle distance unable to move
except for the pull of bourbon to my lip.
When someone asks what I’ve done
with this wasted year, I want to say
I’ve learned so much—how to sew,
the names of cresses, that meaty bite
of puffball cooked in soy—
but all I know is the way your hand between
my shoulderblades makes my skin
ripple like clothes on a line,
how despite this long winter
watching you call for the cat to come in
fills me with so much warmth
even as we shut our door to its world.
Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020) and the founder of the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.