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