Elizabeth Langemak
Hold This
One foot in the shower,
I brush my breasts
and guess the animals
they’re becoming,
the sturdy new weight
stirring inside them.
For a year, I’ll loose
their pink snouts
in the air, and they’ll
compete for my daughter’s
mouth, the language
they cry in pale as her
dreams. But tonight,
possessed by their ghosts,
they’re startled as I am, full
as caught breaths. Hey,
I say to you,
hold this, and you raise
your palm under one
like a man raises
the mouth of a good
dog to his own.
Does the image
offend? Quiver
slightly with me,
then, at the true thing
I don’t know what
to do with. Behind
us, water runs. It
keeps running.
Elizabeth Langemak's poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah, Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination, Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf, she lives in Philadelphia, where she is an Associate Professor of English, and Director of the Higher Education Initiative – a program offering free college courses to local high school students – at La Salle University. Her website is: https://elizabethlangemak.wordpress.com/.
Return to March 2020 Edition
One foot in the shower,
I brush my breasts
and guess the animals
they’re becoming,
the sturdy new weight
stirring inside them.
For a year, I’ll loose
their pink snouts
in the air, and they’ll
compete for my daughter’s
mouth, the language
they cry in pale as her
dreams. But tonight,
possessed by their ghosts,
they’re startled as I am, full
as caught breaths. Hey,
I say to you,
hold this, and you raise
your palm under one
like a man raises
the mouth of a good
dog to his own.
Does the image
offend? Quiver
slightly with me,
then, at the true thing
I don’t know what
to do with. Behind
us, water runs. It
keeps running.
Elizabeth Langemak's poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah, Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination, Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf, she lives in Philadelphia, where she is an Associate Professor of English, and Director of the Higher Education Initiative – a program offering free college courses to local high school students – at La Salle University. Her website is: https://elizabethlangemak.wordpress.com/.
Return to March 2020 Edition