Fainter Sets
Maybe blonde listens but blonde’s no antelope.
From the daybed : a view of the church
the Sunday hands : hands in gloves.
From the daybed : boarded-up evening, wine
while we curl to listen, to reveal the studs—
how that descriptor, blonde, meant innocence
before bust, pledge, ménage—
before the landscape’s corn color
held us in the twentysomething pause—
When we walk home the sidewalks fall
to dust from an earlier world. New frame :
blonde in the doorway. This is impossible and easy.
I don’t know where the property line is—blonde’s
pale hands on the couchback, restless. We listen
to chambers meant for someone else, singing god
and miming the chords : major, minor, fifth, third.
Change Ringing
How much easier it was—fourteen or so,
burning, confused, a kid—rising and falling
with the Kýrie, eléison. With the cælum et terram.
To hang from some unseen governor, even
in pain. How safety cloaks into a place of mind.
I’ve lost that luxury. There are no altars
to usher mayday back to fair. Had I known
this split, this pitting to witness would cost
her light, her fade, her changing number—
I might have staved the boom from the wake.
She was a train that I stood by, a halved bell.
I was a spall. The closest star must have shone
then, must now.
E.G. Cunningham grew up in South Carolina, Italy, and Florida. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Poetry London, Fjords Review, The Nation, RHINO, Quiddity, and other journals. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia in Athens.