Lubbock Spring by Emma Aylor

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It’s easier to pretend the wind is waves—

the new leaves of our pecan swelling

helpless but heavy are bladderwrack,

the porch lamp long unscrewed

from its base and dangling

by a single wire is a buoy filled

with the blurred bodies of krill, not bees,

and floating rather than being lifted,

then dropped, seized roughly, dropped,

until the day (surely soon) the fixture shatters

to the stoop. The crests and falls

of the yellow irises we didn’t plant,

which surprised us our first spring

against the dingy slouch of the rented house,

make coral, I could say, or shells borne up,

and the few wavy glass windows unreplaced

eighty-five years fit right in: they billow marine

before purplish wind, poor brisk birds.

Even the wood floors buckle, to bolster the illusion.

No water here, but I hear water; where

there’s no water, a mind can make water; if

I never see water, your afternoon snore

beside me is water, and the dog’s sigh

at our feet—and in shafts the dull light falls;

we’re far under the surface.

Your hand at my neck, the whole time

you sleep, is green, soft, lapping.

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Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, the Yale Review Online, and elsewhere. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.

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20 March 2023