
2 Poems by Erin Elizabeth Smith
The 32-Cent Heart
If the summer never comes, then we will learn
to love the gray, the way it unfurls the windows,
makes a flush of robins crackle in ornamental fig.
At the farm, a lamb has come, square-headed
and hungry, nuzzling his face into his mother’s
warm brown. She will not nurse him, and all we can do
is wait for him to die. It’s that type of year, when the mud
on your boots won’t come off or dry, when we track
this sadness everywhere. I tell a friend to not fall in love,
but how can she not, when the ram’s tinny voice
sounds so much like a child’s in the night. They say
it takes six months for the body to learn its grief,
to remake the world without what we have lost.
But we lose so much every day. At the market,
lamb’s heart is on sale. I ask for one
and when they bring the bag, it is as small
as a field mouse, a silver dollar to hold tight
in a palm, and at home I unbag it, and I do.
Mushroom Rain
Deployment Day 55
You tell me in Poland they call this
mushroom rain, the hot wet of June
when the chanterelles, boletes spring up
fleshy as sex in the oval-leafed wood.
I split a milk cap with my thumbnail
and it coats my hand in fishy latex,
a smell that makes me think
of the marshes I was grew up in, that salt rot
of brackish Carolina, where the story
of my life could have been anything—
blue crabs roping up a bucket, a squabble
of gull, the sinewy seaweed that scares
up the foot. Instead, I am alone
in the loamy wood, missing the way your hand,
tawny as deer shield, would clasp my arm
on the ATV as we blurred up the hill
to where the black trumpets sprout
from mossy oak. There is nothing
I want as much as you, but today, in this holler,
with its wood ear and meaty bark, I gather
what I love to me and hope at least
for tomorrow to rain.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Executive Director for Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020), and her work has appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American, among others. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the Poet Laureate of Oak Ridge, TN. Find her online at www.sundresspublications.com/erin.
2 May 2022
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