Elizabeth Willis
MY LOVE IS A MIRROR NEURON
Come in, you say
while I’m alive, you say
my hankering love
my hunkered down love
in the headlights of the future
my love of the garbled soliloquy
in the wary fever of my love
with all its modernist ardor
offering to drive
the leaf from the pedicel
the pedicel from the smallest branch
the branch from the trunk
the trunk from the ground
my love growling
like a machine in the yard
my love a yard
of fabric on the line
accepting the clumsiness
of a pulley, my love touching
everything as water
suspected in the summer air
my love coming and going
through the same door
my love killing it in the kitchen
then losing it at the mall
my love diagnosing the room
the very tip of my love
arguing with itself for hours
my love refusing to hide
its suspicious past, my love
staking out the street for days
my love in fear of the doctor
which is really the fear of death
my love relentlessly in the third case
my phatic love in a Canadian bar
my irreligious, abstemious love
mishearing the song of my failed love
my love losing its wallet
and refusing to answer the phone
my love voting its heart out
for this disaster of a country
my unfenceable Augustinian love
my passerine love
heavy in my rough hand
my love with no room in its mailbox
my love loving the texture
of a rented thing
my love refusing the symbolism
of a corporate heart
my love’s malingering dislike
of a stranger’s Impala
my love undone by my heartless
actuarial, my derelict love
dropped like a suitcase at the door
like a needle, like a bridge
my love eclipsed
by the smallest cloud
or lovingly distracted by a bird
the starving love of my unarmored
heart, my love bound with grass
my uniformed carrier
of love on the traceable arc
of its retrograde planet
my hovering love
my local vegetable love
my imitative genius of love
my handwritten, rotting
compostable love, my dying
everyday love, my un
punctuated love, my love sentenced
to this one imperfection
that it forgets my love
my love tapped out on the roof
my unforgiveable
inhospitably leatherette love
my incomprehensibly
woolen love, my densest
cabinet of a many-shelved love
my odiferous cartoon love
out on a limb with a chainsaw
my love thrown from a horse
my love sweeping the floor
of my love and refusing
to go home, my most
indicative, untimely
irreparable love
ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Other books include Address, recipient of the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; and The Human Abstract, a National Poetry Series selection. Willis currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
