Molly McCully Brown & Susannah Nevison

Dear Maker,

My body keeps happening

despite my insistence

otherwise: so I repeat myself:

I’ll tell you how: I start

at the beginning then end

at the beginning: you were there

in all this, or are

there: my mother who

carries me until winter: is there:

was there and it is cold

when I arrived and the fact

of me was small: and I arrive

again at the beginning

and there we are: and here

keeps happening and when

my mother looks at me

I’m sure I happen differently:

each time I arrive: is a body

my body keeps:

Dear Maker,

I’d say the problem isn’t the story

or that I’m in it, or that I resist the ways

I’m drawn. It’s always been gravity and matter

and the planet’s relentless pull.

I resent the game. I don’t want a seat at the table.

I don’t want a table either if it means everything

here is pinned down by its own weight. I’d say

the problem is I haven’t been sold on the ground

beneath me. Nobody told me the view

is much better from space. When the planet becomes

just another raised fist in the distance, I don’t mind.

Though I’m poorly drawn, I still raise mine.

Dear Maker,

Even if it’s true that my body’s

just a transitory letter, a note

you sent, a piece of paper

covered with your writing,

I’d like to know what it is

you meant, if I could mean

something other than what

all lost letters mean: a gesture

no one sees, what all good

storms erase. I’d like to be

read out loud in a voice

that’s all my own. I’d

like to be read with gusto.

Where your writing trails off,

I’d like to see my failed

hand start: Dear Maker, Dear

Other, Dear Lost One, Dear

Me—do you see them coming?

Can you make them out,

those clouds shaped like envelopes,

the way they fold themselves

to keep their contents close?

Dear Maker,

It snows in this strange city.

I’m bewildered by the white,

the way it makes one perfect

creature of the place, one body

built up soundless overnight,

then blown to pieces by the wind,

and how I barrel into it— my body

as unsubtle here as anywhere.

I distrust the weather in my

body—there’s a sudden, shallow

warmth before tornadoes whistle

damage down—before my body

had these seams there had to be

a shattering I don’t remember, you’d have

had to turn your face

away from all the shards.

Allison Adair