Back to Issue Twenty-Six.

Valentine,

BY COREY MILLER

 

The moon reminds me of the elongated moon
of your body, the moon with its little cliché ass,
the moon with its old notions of the soul. I forget the details

of my childhood but not the glacier-ironed fields
I’ve retroactively placed you in
like a bookmark in a memoir, hoping
a bookmark could be read

as part of the story. What is it you’re made of there? The breath of a doe
climbing a ladder of cold air. Something close to romantic

but untainted by the unreality of romance, by the rose
holding love tight by the thorns, unable to be refreshed

even by the Modernists. Nor is your image ruined
by our modern love of reality. So what is it
you’re made of here? Something in-between,

a tale breathed back and forth so often
that we’re finally telling the same
mangled version, like our trip

to the redwoods where the sun grows
steeply up from the ground

as if some kintsugi god had stitched
the broken pot of the forest
with gold.

 

Corey Miller has an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and was the Fall 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, Missouri Review, Narrative, the Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Next (Anna Tomlinson) >

< Previous (Rushi Vyas)