The Procession
We’d walked circles all morning
in our new blue shoes. We
were learning to love
the middle
part best. By now
it was certain
there would not
be an end; nothing loud
and final, destitute,
only the long
archaic creak
of a screen
swinging shut. Love
or whatever love became
our cover for,
the infant we
forgot to feed,
was scrawling
its hand in the tall
grass beside us
and the dusty spot in the back
where we kept the books
sealed with living, sealed
with what we meant to do
but never did would never
stop expanding, growing
hard and luminous
because of all the damage.
Don’t you remember
how the weeks spiraled
how the months dwindled
how that black moth landed
on my lap while I
was sleeping?
It dragged its awkward wings
across my belly
destroying itself
in a trail
of inscrutable dust. What
is the material
substance of grief?
The driftwood piles
on the side of the eddy
monumental and stricken
the driftwood piles
on the side of the eddy
and the hawk on the pole
with the fish in its talons forgets
the finch in the low
bush beside it.
How is it we try
and never learn
how to love
one another?
We are devoured
by what
didn’t happen. The mist
crowns the air.
The hawk vanishes.
Reservoir
At night I stay alone
while my friend goes out
with her new boyfriend.
She loves the way he
pays for everything
but he scares her
when he fucks her.
“It’s not the idea of the thing,”
she tells me, “but the real
life thing itself.”
All the beauty
and the violence
of the world
is in the details.
My mother
resells things we drag up
from the dump,
we have a storage unit full
of shit nobody wants,
we live in a place
nobody has heard of
in a part of the world
nearly everyone
hates. Mars
is that little
red light flashing.
It makes me sad
to think my lover
may never see
a shooting star.
I swim in the cove
where the refuse
builds up. Why
should my body be
any different?
Men come see me
in their flat
bottomed boats.
They catch bass and crappie
that hide in the confines
of logs. Once there was a giant
snapping turtle—
I watched two boys sink
a pitchfork deep
into its back.
All the beauty
and the violence
of the world is detail:
the passion
flower grows until
the fence no longer opens.
Some people live
their whole lives simply
waiting to be touched.
Mary Helen Callier received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was an Olin Fellow and a winner of the Howard Nemerov Prize in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Ghost City Review, Twyckenham Notes, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the Junior Fellow in poetry at WashU and co-edits The Revue portion of The Spectacle Magazine.