Elegy for One Life Lived Within Another by Brianna Noll

I cut myself upon the thought of you
And yet I come back to it again and again

– Amy Lowell, “Granadilla”

Gift of love and light
small and tidy in the salt
air, or thick and hot
beside the coal furnace.
If this is a cult of memory,
let me be more ardent.
After the accident, the days
of my coma were years
lived in another life—
a marriage, children
teething then impossibly
reading polysyllables,
a yard opening to a forest
thick with foxes, my heart
grown large to furnish
rooms for them all—
and now that I’ve
awakened, it will not
be downsized, no matter
how often I write single
on forms, no matter
how many question-and-
answer sessions use logic
to convince me that this
life is my real life, as if
reality must needs be
singular despite us all
being so good at judging
and dividing and parsing
everything else. Would
you say you’re obsessed
with the life you’re leading,
the self you’ve become?
What word would be apt
if it—all of it—
and you—were gone?

Brianna Noll is the author of The Price of Scarlet, selected by Lisa Williams as the inaugural poetry collection in the University Press of Kentucky’s New Poetry and Prose Series. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and lives in Los Angeles.