A poem by Maggie Millner: ‘Forbearance’

We’ve stopped speaking once more
so the earth has no colour.
All over the place the chlorophyll has paused,
mild burning over the day’s classes
as starvation burns
the mouth I can’t make eat.
A bit of rice? A bit of soup?
I’d relatively die
studying the early texts
you despatched about my breasts.
I wouldn’t take an image—
infidelity!—
and so as a substitute had conjured them
with phrases,
for which, with phrases,
you gave me again a tongue
we dragged throughout the pores and skin
of frequent thought.
Such is our lot,
our shared illness or reward.
Like Bernini’s angels
propped someplace in Rome
throughout a nave
we fetishize take away,
which retains the best attainable,
the attainable supreme.
So why is life so uninteresting with out your veins?
At present on Twelfth the pharmacy glass
displays a lady braced
in opposition to a non-public wind:
the wind of her conscience, possibly,
spinning on the mandrel of need.
Later, she opens mail.
She outlets for artichokes and squash,
fingering their grooves
for info from the flesh.
The life I really like can not embody you,
she desires to say,
however as a result of we aren’t talking
she should say it into the poem,
whose potentialities contract
with each phrase.
Watch it slender even because it grows.
That is the phobia—
granite, pixels, blighted grass—
that is the phobia
selections make of lives.