Read More: A Q&A with Allison Adair
Letter to My Niece, in Silverton, Colorado
Someday you will watch your mother lean on the rim of the sink to wash dishes in a way she never has before and you will wonder if she was ever young. I’m here to tell you that cars are so much quieter than they used to be, at a stop sign you never know whose turn it is. It wasn’t always like that. It used to be you could hear an engine from down the road, and know whose it was and where it could take somebody. Your mother’s hair used to be so light it glowed. On the summer boardwalk people stopped to remark. Men asked questions. It got to where we could hardly make it to the Gravitron before the line snaked back to the sea. Those days there weren’t so many metal railings. If your timing was right you could get close to things. To the ride itself, pistons gasping so loud you could almost see the thrust of greased air. To gears joining and unjoining themselves inside a dense black band. To your sister’s impatient hand chiming pink shells on a bracelet, new, from someone we didn’t know. She never answered them, just looked ahead and grabbed my wrist. Don’t look people in the eye. It used to be that you got instructions. Then every ride began playing its own music. Your mother’s white hair faded against the punched paper reams of old calliope, and soon no one could predict flats or sharps. I’m trying to say that waves used to roll in, then back out. That you could count on the moon to give off a little light. It used to be that idling cars might have stopped for the tide, to watch it slide its wet hands up the day’s sand line. But dusk grew tired of resisting, I guess. Or maybe the cars had always been waiting for us, waiting patiently for us to come to the window. If we got close enough they knew they could stir the tiny oceans lapping in our shells.
Border Separation
June 2018-present
Stuff the lilac back into bud,
wring its plump trumpet until
milk gutters down the overfed
spike. Drain each strawberry
of its blush, and hang the sun
on a hook in a far closet.
No more music, cut the radio. Its
spitting volts, unfry, and coil all cords.
Sweep shimmy, shake, bass flooding
us with dank drubbing. In Las Cruces
a statue weeps trophy-colored oil
but for all our scans and graphs,
our casual laughter, no one wonders
why she’s crying. Any almanac can
tell we’ve got it coming. They say
the great horned owl swoops in
silent as a ghost, its voluminous
fringe scissoring wind, swallowing
gusts up into each quilted wing.
Maybe stealth is no more than fear
confused by talons. We’ll debate it
as black holes of philosophical size
serenade us, grinding out universal
blues sixty octaves below middle C.
For some, it’s vital to take a child’s
doll minutes after dragging her mother
toward an idling truck, ankles chained.
Some souls are so empty, they drum
beyond sound—a kind of cosmic dirge.
What does it mean to love one another?
To gaze into the cataract of a hunger
moon and admit you see a man
thrashing against his own weight-
lessness. What does it cost to float
mylar sheets over six-year-olds,
stars in a disregarded constellation,
tell them they’re not allowed to whisper,
to touch, to lean on each other? No. Don’t
go to this parade. Melt blacktop back to
syrupy tar, and fuse macadam into rock.
Reel in roads of any direction, for
the old math never was math after all,
the plus sign just a black X blown over.
We know better, how to add, subtract,
to fiddle the line until two and two
becomes four for me, dust for you.
How to unmake a man, to divide him
into copper, lead, skin loose as a parachute.
To rewind his story until it’s nothing
but seed, seed, thirsting in dry white earth.
Commute
If I tell you about the woman struck
last year, killed, at Beacon & Mass
Ave, about her thin mermaid’s hair
wound around the bike’s gears,
chainwheel flung, thin whitewalls
spinning like a rifle-slackened fawn—
if I tell you, will you hear the truck
rumble, shift, already thundering, long
gone up Storrow West, wedging its boxy heft
into a zipper of earthly traffic, one man
gesturing, at no one in particular,
another dialing, then hanging up—
will you hear? Will you listen for it?
Back at the scene, pedestrians crouch, some
do, plugged by earbuds to wash themselves,
to wash her, body of once was,
with bass, with talk radio, with anything
other than the soundless shape of this
casual unmaking. What I mean to say
is, whenever you have to be away
for work I don’t sleep till the sun rises
in its globular bloat of peace, face
swollen white from deep water, the whole
night I’ve curved myself against the space
where your body would be, if not
lying somewhere far away, both of us
rehearsing the day we cross an intersection
toward this train, or that, sure any
minute we’ll hear someone welcome us
home, lower the blue gas, place the spoons.
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Allison Adair’s collection The Clearing was chosen by Henri Cole for Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and named a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” book. Allison’s poems appear in Best American Poetry, Threepenny Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and ZYZZYVA, and have received the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, and the Orlando Prize. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison now lives and works in Boston.
“Letter to My Niece, in Silverton, Colorado,” “Commute,” and “Border Separation” originally appeared in Mid-American Review, North American Review, and as part of the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize contest, respectively.
Read More: A Q&A with Allison Adair