Ode So Much After the Fact

You said these are coyotes not wolves and my anger shrunk to an egg I could swallow or drown. What I took—fire, flood, and field. To believe, to dream, only in extremes, you will wear yourself out, you said, I’m sorry, I was drifting. Maybe I could be expelled from my body, follow a few feet behind it like a scolded child. You made me a better person. No better way to ignore my addictions than to martyr, to dance in ankle-deep glass. I was lovely for a moment, wasn’t I? Like blood in a vial. You were too, all that throaty need, like a well of mineral water I couldn’t stop dipping my cracked cup into. But what did I lose in all this saving? Shine, buckle, bower. Gunmetal mouthing illness to green, we became agentless. We became people who couldn’t know each other any longer. A house folds in on itself like a popup. A hillside gives out. Sour sonnet, wait for the right hour. I have all these apologies and nothing to say. I take no pleasure in your alone, my having found a lover to hide in like skin. As if the body could be whatever we needed when we needed it—shell, tower, soapbox, a scream hidden among birch leaves. What is the difference between snow and rain? An entire lifetime. If I could forget that trees are concentric on the inside, what else have I lost? I went home that night after I saw you for the first time in years. I undressed. I loved my body again for my mind, the oldest trick in the book.

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Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in northwest Washington. She holds a PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017. Her work has appeared in Granta, Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, Carve, and Colorado Review. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com