Just Us

I sit

up in bed and watch the way my boyfriend
	worships the war-torn crevices of me,

and his tongue serves as an example of
	the crippling nature of poetry, the way our

words cannot forget the bodies they were
	born into.

Why 'Poetry' is Synonymous with 'War'

Winter Rains

There aren’t birch trees here, or at least I’ve
never seen one. The tree I remember is split
like a wishbone, & I used to sit in the middle
of it, back hooked with feet pushing, to see if
I could make it break.

Birch Tree

I hold her against my breastbone. She suckles & spits up
her food, & I wake next to my college boyfriend, miles from
where I fell asleep, in a wedding dress that my mother hand-
stitched for me, bulging with the bump of her granddaughter.

The Daughter I'll Never Have

Can it be called a war when only one side has
power? Power, on a cosmic level, is shaped by
the construct of omnipotence. There is war against
sin, but never against the existence of it, & there
is war among lesser things, but never against
God.

Melissa Perri Smith

Books

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