POETRY

Cup, to Which I Never Move My Lips

By Emma Aylor     VOLUME 59 No. 1

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after Clementine Keith-Roach, 2019 (found ceramic vessel, plaster, paint)


You’re a little ruined, anyway—split at wrist,
tear between ball and socket, a list to the right
in neck, leg, and jaw. The you I use

          is a mingled word: part vessel, largely body,

in the least metaphoric possible sense.
I do really mean the body I can’t help

          but live among, and which brings some of things

right up to me and, offhand,
can only refuse the rest. Not only not
to sing, but also not to move
my tongue or lips. To mash fingers into muscle

          and fat, heel of hand into the strained braid

of pain at my hip: I can’t prove these do nothing
as the paint chips toward the brown of graves, leather,
and darkened bed where I think along each tone
and joint allotted me: which one, this night,

          this absolute middle of the absolute night,

this ridiculous instance of imagined self
who—in dreaming, then awake—turns
bluer and bluer before diffusing: which place

          might trouble me most tomorrow?

•     •     •


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EMMA AYLOR is the author of Close Red Water, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Nacogdoches, TX, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University.


VOLUME 59 No. 1