Read More: A brief Q&A with Mistee St. Clair
Who knows a person’s capacity for love?
I keep reminding myself
how, like when the next child is born, love
splits and swells
into its own new being. And again.
Like how many exponential duplications occur
from that microscopic zygote,
to when we die. Forty-one doublings
gives us 10 trillion cells.
To the lions we become.
To this great, unmeasurable strength.
College Tour Road Trip
He’s been an alien to me for years. In his room is LED strip lighting and a computer that pulses a rainbow from behind its glass case. Colors float from under his closed door. On the plane we finished a crossword together. Then, in our hotel room, I fell asleep listening to him read his favorite book to his girlfriend over the phone. This morning as we start our drive, as casually as I can manage, I say how sweet that was. Yes, we read to each other all the time. I wonder what else happens in that spaceship at home. After some silence, I try to play a question game like we used to on road trips. I don’t know the answers anymore, and he gives me one-word replies before starting a playlist. At least we mostly like the same music. We drive into night and empty wheat fields. I can feel there is something he has to say. Something in the way he holds himself these days, shrinking his six-foot frame. The moon, nearly full, balances on our horizon, pressing on that invisible cleave of earth and space. As the road curves up the hill the moon flanks our right. I say It looks like it’s touching earth. I notice we both keep glancing at it so I pull over to take a picture. He tries to show me the right settings to use, but I think there is no way to capture how something so far appears so close.
A Letter Never Sent
Do you remember when I wrote to you
from the delicious, slurring heat of the tropics.
That night I listened to guttural thunder
and rain thumping glass. I told you
it was never quiet except between us.
Even at night the cicadas chirred outside
and geckos chittered in the house.
All year it is summer. Dust kicks up from the road.
The trees green between sun and rain.
Mostly we did and did not want
the same things. It was a strange fever […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
The House Your Father Built
This morning you lit a candle for your father
and read a meditation about the armor we forge
for our dragons. The candle burns but you can’t seem to finish.
It’s been three days. A week since you last
poured him a whiskey. Your father was dying
and at the end you thought about the red house
on the pond that was a marina not for boats
but for float planes, the one he built for his mother,
with the rooftop sunroom full of light-
drunk tomatoes and a spiral staircase to the cupola
and the telescope you weren’t allowed to touch.
Those were the good years, when you were young,
but old enough to know what memories to keep.
In summer, you floated the pond with all the cousins,
slapping black flies, checking for leeches, while planes
took off and landed like skaters. And sometimes you took off […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
Mistee St. Clair has received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and an Alaska Arts and Literary Award, and has poems in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, Northwest Review, SWWIM Every Day, and more. She lives in a northern rainforest in Lingít Aaní (Juneau, Alaska), where she hikes, writes, wanders amongst the moss, and edits legislation for Alaska State Legislature. She can be found at misteestclair.com.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Mistee St. Clair