Erin Elizabeth Smith

Dear John

for John

I get it now.  Half a decade later

as I watch the wind race the leaves

down my rain-black street

face wrecked from puffed

up promises that linger in blood.

I don’t want to dream you

but I do, you in that same wooden house

always turning the knob with surprise,

the wrists of your shirts

ringed at the elbow.

There is always a woman

just beyond that nostril of your door,

cross-legged on the floor looking up

at me not like I’m a rainstorm

or the phantom of the woman I was.

I don’t know you now,

but I remember you paralyzed

on the grey-sheeted bed, how I touched

the flat of my palm to your back

wondering what hands to put on to heal,

how there is nothing in beauty

that makes up for loss, the deception

of birds, the way they sound like memories

in dark attics. 

Six months divorced and you are all

I come back to, the way you would empty

into the still of Urbana streets,

as static as the childhood toys

that float forever on abandoned lawns

like the way I come to you at night,

thinking of what you saw in me,

how I must have looked like her

so perfectly young and dark-boned.

How you found me

like I look for men now, as hurt

and as clutching as you.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including 32 Poems, New Delta Review, Yalobusha Review, Water~Stone, Cimarron Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Stirring: A Literary Collection and the Best of the Net Anthology.