DEAR WONDER

 

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I have holed away in this house for many months 

not to escape the world but to feel more 

inside it. And yet when I emerge, 

I doubt I will be closer to the trees, 

their ancient knowledge, nor able to tease

from autumn’s gold the nighthawk’s

sharp cry. Could I have tried harder? 

Even memory flees when it comes 

too near death: that squirrel I found 

with its neck twisted on the road, 

already a spreading black spot in my mind. 

Along Cherokee Avenue there stands 

a church where once stretched a river, 

a stoled deacon kneeling before its door. 

Always the air smells of jasmine, always 

the streetlights on the street corners stay dark. 

At night we ask each other questions, 

speculate on what’s to come. 

How little we know for sure. 

One day the world will be stripped

clean to its pith, and still we will take it between 

our lips, steeling for any last drop. 

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BIO:

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​Lauren Aliza Green is the author of the novel The World After Alice (Viking, 2024) and the chapbook A Great Dark House, selected by Joshua Bennett as the winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. 

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