MAKE A WISH
A million teaching moments
at our new location
is a monster with headless eyes
I shared to be kind. A dim
guitar weaves together bodies
that ossify. Mother's Day
provides evidence for our
argument that undoes it, my
animate hand caressing
the length of you. Who gets
to be an atmosphere, really,
her entire back covered with
rentals, a mating dance you can
feel shifting genders. Who
can stay gluten free under such
corrosive duress being poked
repeatedly in the same
bruised spot when liberal
desire conjures and slays
me? My sentences
disappear into you
like a snake waiting for an
echo, a forbidden fruit
canyon of lips, feet,
tendons, parasols, entire
voices declaring hardship
against a real girl. It's only
us reproducing the
dilated world of strollers
with stuck wheels reveling
in the April I gravel. The wasp
having deposited the mail
arguments waiting for
UPS endlessly. The bell
rings now. It's not for me.
It is for me! It's giving
mixed signals like a nape
to kiss a path along, wired
to a range of ghosts who
caress my name. You're
floating there, too. I love
you. And I disbelieve or can't
unsnarl my peace in a brightly lit
dinner party ringed with hurt
and a placemat offering
authorship that lasts.
Trace Peterson is a poet, editor, and literary scholar. Her poetry book Since I Moved In was republished by Chax Press in 2019 in a revised edition. She is co-editor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax) and of the ground-breaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books). Peterson is the Editor/Publisher of EOAGH, a literary journal and small press that has won two Lambda Literary Awards and a National Jewish Book Award. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UConn, Storrs.