Sallie Fullerton

FOIL

Permanence is easily made of such material,
the toughness, the pressure by which
the thought was pressed—the need of it,
the impossibility that anything could be buried
for so long and unearthed and still you living
and still you anything more than X-ray.

Of course, you will not be. You’ve reckoned,
you’re reckoning. This is a verb to which there is no
finality, only a relentless campaign—
the simple delight of seeing an ancient street below
your street. The rudiment of it, the self-stealing
preserve. We both need to sit
and our parts are so sore.

There is a between I am ignoring, a past
pushed hastily through a hole, but I am young.
What is unknowable is intrinsic,
the present from one to another,
the pledge of friendship.

(I cling, I ruffle out)

Simple, foolhardy tricks of perspective
make me a whale and you a whale’s
muzzle, meanwhile, no one is touching.
The terror of it. This is how your nervous system
responds, by the way. This is what hurts you.

Close your eyes.

There we immediately found ourselves
in a house too dainty for a home
in clothes too big in every way.
Take them off carefully in the morning
and destroy them. There is maybe no other way
to enjoy your body but to see it.
Even you who has failed at preservation
such that a bud bursts straight
from your abdomen.

If we had mission, if we had rites,
unnatural and lifegiving,
then each day you, thin as a lathe, would emerge
from your bedroom and produce a thin tablet,
wrap it in foil,
and take it as lunch.

SALLIE FULLERTON holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry has been published in Frontier Poetry, Slanted House Collective, and Vagabond City Lit.