2 Poems

No. One Hundred and Seven

— after Emily

My mother said, as she departed—the worm

moon will be tonight. On the beam

was she, with the light of I.

In moonly sedation, like a mammography unit,

my valorous accessory is to ray. Munificent

sleep, my night’s water, follows

the seventh hour, lithely

as a sated anhinga. When I wake, the Other

unclasps her bone barrette, like the capitulated jaw

of a cervine, and knots her hair—

threads of silvery speech and celestial

stutter, crimped into my own. Beside me

on this early train, she is not the cold in memory’s

furred muff, but the fumatorium’s burnt

ends, the dished ashes, the clayed blister of rouge.

Unlike to die to end, she begins.

And so, I—and, so shedded in my mother’s

drawer, the perfumery of her headful of blonde.

Dear Man

Early morning, an elderly man rides by in his carriage.

When I see him, I see my father years from now

in another life. After, I see the dead fields

haunting his heart, humming the ghosts of his girls

from grain. I imagine I glove his hands

in my own as we walk through the meadow. Mostly

we do not speak, until I confess I found in him

what I never found in my paternal grandparents. All

my life, there was longing—birds darkening

with the worm and crying on the crook of willows,

children ivory-veiled at evening vespers

as the pipe organ groans. My work is not done

until he believes that he is more than a man

who was not home on the night his wife & daughters

were murdered. He is more than a man at a bar,

drowning the apparition of war while his family bled

to death in their beds. He is more than a man

in a dark cemetery, placing flowers on their graves.

Anastasia K. Gates is a writer, editor, and artist from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and awarded the shortlist for the inaugural Oxford Poetry Prize, her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Oxford Poetry, The Penn Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Only Poems, Plainsongs and elsewhere. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from Columbia University in the City of New York and she is currently at work on her debut and second collections of poems.