Emma Aylor
Equipoise
Visiting West Texas, my nightgown is thin;
trees bound by the box window toss heads like horses.
If there are ghosts attending us, I don’t know
the lines of their movements clicking beads together
in crossing. The dog watches the green light
go yellow and burn. It’s still summer here, though tired,
though back in Seattle it’s autumn, wet and dropped
round, closed over, as into a stream. As ferries pass
back and forth, back to the living, back
to the dead, green-enameled railings ring
with slowing before a stop.
This was weeks ago, in the bay.
Days crimp closed at the ends, or they never close—
time adjusts its passing with little ceremony.
I know that women change each night,
sometime in the center. When we were girls,
the moon shuffled loosely through its phases;
we had no way then to track the wax
and wane when its round was just a dime to flip,
not a nail pinning our hair to one place on earth.
I’m sure I thought—who would choose this?
To know the going and watch it as it went.
I can’t remember her, and she can’t put me back
together either. She’s sitting on a table,
side of the close mountain, three friends near, fourteen
in the photograph, sweet pea blossoms in her hair, night;
in another, eyes wait for a face to grow in behind them;
in one hand she holds a sunflower and in the other
the family dog’s red collar and in her mouth, in this image, a flare
centers like belief before its kept melting.
But you see that I am moving backwards.
Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Barrow Street, Yemassee, and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she is the recipient of Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowan Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Raised in Bedford County, Virginia, she currently lives in Seattle. Visit her site: emmaaylor.com/
Return to May 2020 Edition
Visiting West Texas, my nightgown is thin;
trees bound by the box window toss heads like horses.
If there are ghosts attending us, I don’t know
the lines of their movements clicking beads together
in crossing. The dog watches the green light
go yellow and burn. It’s still summer here, though tired,
though back in Seattle it’s autumn, wet and dropped
round, closed over, as into a stream. As ferries pass
back and forth, back to the living, back
to the dead, green-enameled railings ring
with slowing before a stop.
This was weeks ago, in the bay.
Days crimp closed at the ends, or they never close—
time adjusts its passing with little ceremony.
I know that women change each night,
sometime in the center. When we were girls,
the moon shuffled loosely through its phases;
we had no way then to track the wax
and wane when its round was just a dime to flip,
not a nail pinning our hair to one place on earth.
I’m sure I thought—who would choose this?
To know the going and watch it as it went.
I can’t remember her, and she can’t put me back
together either. She’s sitting on a table,
side of the close mountain, three friends near, fourteen
in the photograph, sweet pea blossoms in her hair, night;
in another, eyes wait for a face to grow in behind them;
in one hand she holds a sunflower and in the other
the family dog’s red collar and in her mouth, in this image, a flare
centers like belief before its kept melting.
But you see that I am moving backwards.
Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Barrow Street, Yemassee, and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she is the recipient of Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowan Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. Raised in Bedford County, Virginia, she currently lives in Seattle. Visit her site: emmaaylor.com/
Return to May 2020 Edition