Learning Russian
In a city this big I keep looking
for you. Surely you're here too, in the way
the streetlamps never kick on, in walking
the Summer Garden tired and dismayed
at what the floods had taken. Or maybe
in how I hold my fork and knife away
from my body as I eat or the sheen
of boats as they unfasten from the dock.
Each night I dream you, how all this could be
plural, punctuated. Then I am shocked
when I unearth you in another man.
The way he laughed. Certainly how he looked
at me, like I was a suitcase handle,
his cupboard of bread. I start to think no
one belongs anywhere, to anyone.
I start to think that everyone knows
everyone else. That Petersburg could be
any city, especially in snow,
especially when the canal debris
rubs against the bridges as if they're hands.
But then that's not true. No matter how he
talks about touching but does not, I can
feel how far I am from you. Yet so close.
It's hard not to know him. To keep the land
a foreign thing. In Russian, there are no
articles – no difference in "a" or "the".
No night or dark despite how late it grows.
[1/08]
Everything Here is Real and Nothing
I wonder if love happens in the way
people say it does – the spontaneous
kinetics in a kiss, the Santa Fe
blue of his opening eyes. Maybe yes.
Maybe the dust settled in me pretends
to be open wings, the song of the blessed.
Then I start to think that love might be spin,
that there's nothing – no ceiling or a floor.
When I touched you the first time, did my skin
howl like it'd been seared, was my heart a door
that swung into life? Probably not. No,
it was probably like touching him. The more
he talked about how his wife left, the low
growling in the chest from a wound that can't
close, the more my hand drifted to his own,
gripping his fingers across the vast span
of a sudden table. It was foreign
and warm and, sadly, so unlike your hands
which I almost feel, sometimes, when it's dim
with winter and I hate myself for not
being home yet. For pretending loving
him or you could save me, while my hands rot
into something that burns. Maybe we tell
ourselves that our bodies are sails we taught
to fill. Maybe we're cities on a hill
or birds that never open up to sing.
Maybe closing my fingers on a still
palm fixes something. Maybe it's the thing
we all need fixed. But what is that? The good
days feel ephemeral, like milk spoiling
in the fridge. And all the others, they could
fill a country. They could take us away
and make the softness stop. Make it so hard.
[1/08]
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Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of the book The Fear of Being Found (forthcoming from three candles press). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi where she serves as the managing editor of Stirring and the Best of the Net anthology. Her poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Crab Orchard, Natural Bridge, West Branch, The Pinch, Rhino, and Willow Springs, among others.
