POETRY

Reading Notes: What Belongs to You

By Mirande Bissell     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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I don’t want to betray anyone.

I flip the calendar to February
and cannot make out
which date it is I will do
the worst thing in my life,
some morning that will
begin with the moon rising
like a kidney in the cold.

I am reading a book
of erotic loneliness
set in Bulgaria, and I am afraid
the story will reveal not only
what I don’t know but what
I will never feel.

A single planet
in the cloudless sky, I am
on the highway at sunrise
driving to my new
teaching job in a trailer
on the I-95 corridor.

I am cut out in the very shape
of every pop song
that comes on. Love is
the unstrangest
thing I know. Your sleep,
the last cloud as Earth
and heaven
melt away from each other.

I have promised
not to run away,
and this time I mean it,
though you cannot stay
a wife forever. One day,
you will be water.

After householder comes erotic,
or comes pilgrim?

Do you remember which?

Everyone will leave one day
for their own paradise.

They will be so alone there.

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MIRANDE BISSELL is a teacher and writer who lives near Baltimore, in the Patapsco River Valley. Her first book of poems, Stalin at the Opera, was selected by Diane Seuss as the 2020 winner of the Ghost Peach Press Prize.


VOLUME 57 No. 1