“First Christmas Without You ” was first published in Aeolian Harp Anthology, 2021; and “Clean Sheets” appeared first in Artemis Journal, 2021. The cover art is a sculpture by Marta Abbott, Ketophyllum.
WHERE DO WE CARRY THE DEAD?
In our hearts, the poets tell me. Even
the skeptics believe a god of love
handmakes a room in me. My body, the mausoleum,
holds your life’s thousand photos
I have swallowed along with your opal soul
that makes my skin shimmer. Gone then
to our chapel full of songbirds, I warble out an opus, each note
tinted fine gray. Obsessed to calculate your death
coordinates, I call you to inhabit my body,
as well as the intervals when life and death blur,
the smudge dissolving charcoal figures,
the moments when we can be anything—
grass, aspen, trout, sun—
hearts flocked with tearing wings.
SLEEP GLUTTON, MY HANDS ARE EMPTY
It’s surreal, the vibration of the dog’s
snoring on my foot, the cataract of white
icicles spiked bony from the roof.
You bequeathed me an appetite for sleep.
Afternoon light sours into evening, urine-
yellow, a healthful color, unlike your rust-blood pee
leaking into the catheter bag. So much tumor torture,
you said the catheter’s insertion didn’t hurt.
Each time you were flown from our rural
woods to the city hospital, you’d under-report
your pain: four meant an eight, five meant a ten.
My strong-willed love, we were warriors
of helplessness, fighters bungling a cancer
that ate you from inside out, ate you
so thoroughly only your eyes could be donated.
~***
Sea-glass green, your dead eyes were kept moist
by wet gauze while we prayed over your body,
blessing every part of you for what it gave and took.
I was knifed seeing your shinbone honed skeletal,
your feet hanging limp, alabaster,
as if pierced on a Catholic cross.
A nurse tucked your blanket
with hospital corners, the animus, the man
gone.
And when the coroner zipped
the body bag over your precious face,
I noted its heavy texture, burgundy
with pink flecks, and I felt smothered
as if I were zipped in, too,
unseeing and unseen,
drifting in dreamless sleep.
CLEAN SHEETS
Mortality today smells fresh: seep of snowmelt, meandering
sun. A day to clip sheets to the line, spring-slack
and stretched thin as your death smile.
I feel you as near as my shadow on this sun-struck sheet.
When I push the cotton, it lifts like a curtain—
no dead, no living, just you and me, face to face.
Sparrows sing your whereabouts,
Our dogs, too, know where you are.
They nap, each in her own scrap of light
intuiting trust in a way I can’t.
Where are you? Please.
In childhood I’d raise my hands to the bleached
sheet, cross into the realm of the dead.
How I wish seeing you fleshed were that simple.
As I watched sheets drying in sun, I wondered how long
it would take to get outdoors, clip wooden pins
on my fingers to make witch nails, to run
headlong into clean sheets to reach the secret place
where the dead smoke cigars and play
cards over a cable-spool table.
If I threw back our bedcovers, would you appear,
grinning, as if cancer had never sealed your sleep?
What magic can bring you to my side of the sheet,
where we could visit over coffee: mine latte, yours,
espresso? Teach me the hoodoo to summon you.
FIRST CHRISTMAS WITHOUT YOU
I pass the grapes and loaf to no one,
set the teapot between two cups.
I tear the heel off your sourdough, dip
it into your homemade oil, luminous
gold-green pool on a white plate.
A yeast of sorrow bloats in my throat,
Christmas carols shatter the silence,
my red sweater, your twinkling lights,
the echo of colors on the curve of a glass.
I never understood how much I needed you to sustain me.
Under the blanket, we lay dying.
At the time, I thought it was only you.
WE ALIGN THROUGH SKY-TIME
Respect the unmown grasses, each leaf the name of a decedent
written in sensual calligraphy. Respect the leaves’ velvet necks
bent under bare feet, as we stand languid, you without feet or body,
for what seems like the duration of a butterfly’s life.
Spellbound by Aphrodite Sweetshrub, we inhale its fragrance,
the sound an oboe would make if it flowered.
And there, the mountain that purples at sunset, and there, t
he lake whose surface breeze makes blue tremble like cellophane.
Sunset peaks, then wanes, spent as we are after lovemaking.
Perhaps what is brief is permanent, perhaps our lives
are one ongoing communal presence. Perhaps ancestry does not belong
to historians but sculpts our every move, our every breath—deep, clean.
Lindsey Royce’s poems have been published in many journals, including Aeolian Harp #8, #7 and #5; Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts; The Hampden-Sydney Review; The New York Quarterly; Poet Lore; and Washington Square Review. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and her first poetry collection, Bare Hands (WordTech), was published in September of 2016. Her second collection, Play Me a Revolution (Press 53), was published in September of 2019. The Book of John (Press 53) is her third collection and is dedicated to her husband, John Kevin Bouldin, who died young from stomach cancer. It is Royce’s tribute to him and to those we all love.
