Two Poems by Traci Brimhall

Dear Thanatos,

I am three thoughts away from the grave,
two steps away from the open door,
one kiss away from the bridge.

Dear volcano, where are you?

Dear battleship, your war planes
sit on the bottom of the sea,
eels coiled in the cockpits.

Dear moon, you were an accident.

Dear second heartbeat I’m relieved
you left my body before I could choose.

Dear ghost, leave my attic, crawl
down the drainpipe to the ditch,
to the tunnels beneath the city.

Haunt the rats. Sleep in their bones.

Dear bruise, I promise.
Dear fossil, I am sorry for the light.

Dear Thanatos—

Goddamn the sweet ease of night.
Damn the daylight, too. Dream me.

Winter me. Sleep me somewhere numb.
Somewhere God doesn’t summon me

from the side of a man who begs me to dive
the well and bring up the boat. I ate the liver

of a seal and a narwhal’s arctic tongue. I shot
a humpback with a harpoon. It struggled,

but it sang the moral mysteries, moaned
its oral history to the submarines as it fell,

its body a 100-year feast for the ocean floor,
the testament in its belly gone so wild,

so wracked with doubt not all the fat on
the whale’s back could burn the meaning out.

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). She is also the author of a book for young readers, Sophia & the  Boy Who Fell (SeedStar Books). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Orion, The Oxford-American, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.