After Czeslaw Milosz
Lord, I loved the first days of Boston winter
and walks through Copps Hill where the graves
stick black and crooked like rotted teeth.
Also the man, or his blue eyes, the way
their color thinned like melting ice
when he got stoned. That he was twenty years my senior
but I was smarter. Then there are things I thought I hated
and now find myself sick for: the stench of a room
after sex, a man’s insistence that he knows best,
the ocean. Some afternoons I’d sit
listening to the lap of the Atlantic at the dock
and feel like I’d made it into the stomach of something.
What kind of woman am I? Forgive me —
I love walking into the mouths of things.
Maybe there is no worth in questioning whether
I deserved it, but there is a kind of romance
in this practice, picking off the white petals
of my conscience, turning between
two questions that together make up
an answer — why me, why not.
Ella Q. Peavler
Ella Q. Peavler is a poet from Indianapolis, Indiana. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, and earned her B.S. in Journalism from Emerson College, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her approach to poetry is closely tied with her background as a journalist, and her work explores questions of religion, historical and personal memory, womanhood, and the relationship between poetry and truth.
