Her eyes are narrow, her hips jut out:
a replica of every girl we’ve ever known.
He kisses her mouth hard with tongue & spit.
I hated the way she bossed me, the way
she was a woman & i was still a girl.
Raw tobacco swayed in the barn.
You just a baby, she tells me
her voice sounding like pity
her hand flapping in the wind like her mother’s.

Crystal Wilkinson

What’s hard is deciding what we need to spell out,
and what would trip you up, where can’t you cope.
There is a kind of urban legend, or myth,

that we never say what we mean, or even try,
but those are fighting words. Besides the hype
it’s mostly dishonesty we can’t stand;

that, and people who have so much self-doubt
that they never say what they want.
Most of us are older than you think.

We definitely do not all have the same type.
Each of us fears isolation, but cherishes solitude,
along with our ability to count,

divide, and let our complex math include
all relevant variables: the x, the y,
and anything else that matters to all of us, with
the important exception of the kitchen
table, or else the kitchen sink.

Stephanie Burt

Binary thinking leaves out so much. For example,
Reading only left to right, or up and down,

Ignores all our wishes for comfort, for circular motion,
All the ways that the happier letterforms seek the option

Not to stand alone. Their living space is ample,
Hot in June, cold in March, with pencil lines of frost

Along the stems and twigs in all their dewy, new-built
Nests. Some warblers build more than one.

Each feels tiny compared to thunderstorms, construction
Cranes, plate tectonics and how the past

Harms the present with its slush-avalanches of guilt,
And yet it made us—us. How little we know. How much

Knowing isn’t the point. We love how the letters can touch.

Stephanie Burt

All things must come
to an end, but I never
want them to end: I would rather keep on
an open book, continue whatever
gets me excited, replay
a lightning strike, or cast
a plumb line that may never touch
the bottom, crash
through every stubborn wall. It’s
true that I come to a point. I divide
each present from every past. But I also exist
to celebrate what’s next; I support
purposiveness, enterprise, and the intrepid spirit
of getting things done. That’s why I feel deeply akin
to vacuum cleaners, to the letter T,
to batteries, and to the short
and long versions of any handmade stroke
that could be the numeral 1, or an 1, or an I.
I am, also, an inkblot, a sudden stain
emerging below a quill pen, a sign
of danger, and a way to be overjoyed,
an antiquated firearm along
with smoke from its retort.
And I have been able to see
myself as a telescope;
a way to print
the otherwise
unprintable; a tail
for flight, or for seaside escape,
and even the kind
of anchor that stands for hope.
I am the lever big enough
to move the world, the world you move,
actions and actors,
the proof and the claim you prove,
the product of all mathematical factors.
You cannot use me
as a taxi, or for a quick lift, or just to get
yourself from one place to another; I mean to stay.
I can announce
the end of everything,
the feeling of dangling, of having
the world on a string,
or else a new day.

Stephanie Burt

Neither one thing nor the same
thing all the time, I am the punch
lines of jokes about copy and type, the mark of least use,
the maiden aunt of punctuation.
I feel at home in old formes, amid dust and clutter,
akin to the moths whose wings show my outline,
no good in a crunch.
Educated kids forget my name
or try to turn when, if ever, they would choose
me into a game. I am also accused
of harboring ambitions above my station.

I am still figuring some of that out myself.
I know, though, that I was made to join together
things formerly thought incompatible, to be neither-
nor and both-and; to seek a connection
that does not amount to copulation.
In Greek I simply indicate a question.
I always keep one eye open. I know what I’ve seen.

My siblings-in-arms include the tractor trailer,
platypus, lungfish, merfolk and seaplane.
When challenged about my right
to exist by some precocious reader or editor
who makes my deletion into a helpful suggestion,
I once allowed myself to be struck out;
now, however, I will more likely assert
that I have been around for centuries,
long before anyone asked me to explain.

Stephanie Burt

Sligo town

This small child at a travellers’ halting site
(in American: trailer park)
chose to arrange
two-dozen-odd slabs of cracked asphalt,
each about the size of a housecat,
so that
they made a straight path, then veered up to the property line
in the shape of a giant, crumbling question mark.
Anything, given time, can become a fine
art. Anything can turn over, or decline,
or break, or come back together, or simply change.
Put that in your model museum. Put that in your vault.

Stephanie Burt

I’m proud of my work,
if you can call it work:

I am, also, fond
of far-off lightning, and completed connections,

and and and and and and and and.
I want to be everyone’s long-distance friend,

a second-chance source for anyone’s tenuous spark.
Like sex, I may be overemphasized,

overlooked and misused, kept out of the most polite quarter.
No mark I make should ever

be final. I love the idea of public performance,
like a girl on a wheel in a spotlight on a wire.

I see myself as neither straight nor curved.
And yet I am all too familiar with

the experience of creativity as temptation,
the feeling that you are always required

to volley, that you are never allowed to serve.
Every tragedian I know is a liar:

the announced end of a story is never
the end. That postcredits scene is my salvation,

my first line of self-defense,
the board I break, the myth I use against myth.

I am insatiable, forever
and always still swimming, and on my way. I take

and wonder whether I give. I know what it’s like
to believe you have an appeal you never deserved.

Stephanie Burt

We, too, feel uneasy alone; we believe we exist
to keep you safe and self-contained, at the cost

of making you seem, or feel, like you might not matter,
or not from the outside,

or not much.
We try to protect you. We have nothing to hide.

We can adjust
ourselves to look straighter, or flatter,

or more like sharpened claws, but we largely prefer
the state in which we resemble finger-

nails, or a French manicure,
reaching out with both our hands, your cure

for shapelessness, for your persist-
ent feeling that you will forever

remain immaterial, that you are better
off that way, that there is nothing or

nobody you are ready to let yourself touch.

Stephanie Burt

We have a soft spot for drama,
    and for memorization;

we like to share whatever we have been told.
    We liken ourselves to tadpoles, to works-in-progress,

to fishhooks, to earbuds, to loquacious
    teens, and to their vintage Princess phones.

We used to believe that, being so good
    at belatedness, we might never have to get old,

which was our mission, or our curse;
    though our true age is unclear, we have had equivalents

in nearly every civilization,
    both in our efforts at sarcasm and our attempts
at protests. Leave our single sisters alone.

We come in several shapes but are never
    heartless, or pointless, and never entirely straight

If you ever see just one of us,
    wait.

Stephanie Burt

   Honestly astonishing
the first time you see them unless you grew up with them,
   they look prickly enough
        to cling to your clothing. Instead

   they are a soft
unsettlement, their promise
   of sweetness more than justified
        inside, like the way

    you told me you once
got to pet a porcupine, nibs
    relaxed and folded back for better
        nuzzling, or the first

    time (after waiting and
waiting) you let me hold
    your hand. Cliché
        means clench, clutch and

    predictable, but also
sometimes true. Sometimes I feel tenderly
    opened up, wet and revealed as if cut
        in two. I want to spend
            today with you.

Stephanie Burt