I have fallen in love with how she makes me feel
before bed each night, when I wait to turn out the lights
for her hair to slither into parts, settle under this dome
of stars. the earth has ended more than once, but still
we carry on beneath a hand-stitched quilt. here,
we make breakfast from our own sets of eggs.
I have always liked to move my hand against stone,
even cemeteries that house our frailest parts. bone
into dust, bone into some new set of stars, bone
against bone like the crack of two sticks. such echo.
when she asks if I want a child, I point to a valley
of trees laid bare in smoke, fire signals sent
from the ocean floor. the skin on my face
has dried, my uterus removed and placed inside
a jar. where can we go to fix it all?
where can we go to build a set of eyes, a face
we could both love into ruin. let me show you
the core of a creature who blooms gladiolus,
arranges these feathers like down around my head,
forgives my sharpest tongue as it lashes
and kills and kills and kills.
Christen Noel Kauffman is a 2022 National Poetry Series finalist and author of The Science of Things We Can Believe, winner of the 2023 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry. Her work can be found in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others.