A poem by Maggie Millner: ‘Forbearance’

We’ve stopped speaking once more
so the earth has no coloration.
Everywhere the chlorophyll has paused,
gentle burning over the day’s classes
as starvation burns
the mouth I can’t make eat.
A little bit rice? A little bit soup?
I’d slightly die
studying the early texts
you despatched about my breasts.
I wouldn’t take an image—
infidelity!—
and so as an alternative had conjured them
with phrases,
for which, with phrases,
you gave me again a tongue
we dragged throughout the pores and skin
of frequent thought.
Such is our lot,
our shared illness or reward.
Like Bernini’s angels
propped someplace in Rome
throughout a nave
we fetishize take away,
which retains the perfect attainable,
the attainable ultimate.
So why is life so boring with out your veins?
Today on Twelfth the pharmacy glass
displays a girl braced
towards a non-public wind:
the wind of her conscience, possibly,
spinning on the mandrel of want.
Later, she opens mail.
She outlets for artichokes and squash,
fingering their grooves
for info from the flesh.
The life I really like can not embrace you,
she desires to say,
however as a result of we’re not talking
she should say it into the poem,
whose prospects contract
with each phrase.
Watch it slender even because it grows.
This is the phobia—
granite, pixels, blighted grass—
that is the phobia
decisions make of lives.