Poetry By Rebecca Aronson

David Antis CC




So Much of Living is Undoing

It’s always a field, ghost of nectar on the wind, peaches 
devolved into lather the ground sips. 
On the porch, ristras the future will turn
to dust. Somewhere a bright hollow where children swim
and dusk grows silhouettes that resemble faces, where I am still
moving through shadows in a dress I wore to tatters. 

One summer I drove roads that didn’t lead anywhere I recognized, 
dust cloud following like a good dog, gravel and space, 
a lone farmhouse, signs for the ice caves, other places 
I wouldn’t enter. I drove with a void in my chest, drove
through lands so hushed I could almost believe
that silence was insight, that I was learning something
I wouldn’t have to learn again. 






The Mystery

                Maybe there is a chamber
                in which it is all floating: 
                the lost pendant, the missing silk scarf, 
                fifteen cat’s collars, all the names and faces
                I couldn’t conjure in the moment
                or later, the events my friends recount
                of which I haven’t the slightest image.
                Misplaced keys, most of the 7th grade, 
                the taste of the mouth of the boy I kissed
                behind the school that year. The path to the lake
                where we’d swim at night, grown over now,
                unfindable even in daylight. What happened
                to the body I outgrew, my taste for marshmallows, 
                Abba, liquor flavored like Red Hots, the cool sting
                of menthol cigarettes, the things I loved
                and no longer like at all. What happens to 
                the self, that little hard seed in its untraceable raft?

​


Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is https://www.rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com/


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