Eleanor Stanford
HOW I THOUGHT ABOUT MY BODY
Driving north through rain, I watched the Schuylkill
outgrow its banks. I’d packed three dildos,
an eighth of weed, a Danish novel:
the coffin that is childhood, the shadows
of old longing at the end. And in between,
streetlights and moon, loneliness, methadone,
a stolen jar of marmalade. I mean,
I thought about the edges: backbone,
burning nerves, closed borders. I wanted
to escape, but also be contained. We
built a fire, drank some wine. The blunted
smolder of damp wood, a stark tableau of trees.
We talked about the history of glass.
Outside, the forest, fog, and meadow grass.
ELEANOR STANFORD is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Imaginal Marriage (Carnegie Mellon University Press). She has been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Cape Verde Islands and a Fulbright fellow to Brazil. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
ISSUE ELEVEN features poetry by José A. Alcántara, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Monica Berlin, Joel Brouwer, Julia Cohen, Timothy Donnelly, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Robert Fernandez, Nick Flynn, Wendy Guerra, Chelsea Harlan, Brian Henry, Harmony Holiday, David Kirby, Ginger Ko, Virginia Konchan, Joseph O. Legaspi, Shane McCrae, Daniel Poppick, Danniel Schoonebeek, Matthew Tuckner, Genya Turovskaya, and Corey Van Landingham; fiction by Josh Bell, Ed Park, and Tom Quach; nonfiction by Albert Abonado, Mary Quade, Sarah Anne Strickley, and Jennifer Tseng; a film essay by J. M. Tyree; and Harmony Holiday in conversation with Sandra Simonds.