And what if it wasn’t our bodies? Breath of our bodies,
bone of our bodies’ script. The voluptuary and night.
That the sky knows itself the way
touch remembers touch. Nachlass. November.
Once even, in the dismal center of winter,
what seemed the only supping. Porch light and yellowing.
Corn and cloth. That the places I longed for most are,
even now, not places— I know what your letters brought
me that night: Outside, the helmet and grains of God.
Outside, the radial thawing. Son. What bones for the missing.
Stacy Kidd’s poems have appeared in Columbia: a Journal of Literature and Art, CutBank, Poet Lore, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She is poetry editor for Quarterly West and a teaching fellow in the Ph.D. creative writing program at the University of Utah.
