By Jen McClanaghan

Featured Art: “In the Garden” by Tina Moore, Tiffany Grubb, Alexis Rhinehart, Casey Collins, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

I look for you in travel plazas.
In claw machines. In corn husks, crank
shafts, coils and pumps, in funnels.
I look for you at breakfast
and again at dusk. I look in
weather, in dust, in bird song, in barking.
In the magnetic field of the wildflower.
In sockets, in closets, in strangers.
In Spanish, in rain’s silver fringe.
In the hawks that land to look at me.
In the splinter that entered my thumb
from a drawer that belonged to you,
could it be? I hold the cheap pens
in your purse. I spend money on shoes
to make myself feel like you.
I dreamt you were on my deck
with your eyes closed.
In your dresses I fold
for someone else, I see how tiny you were.
I watched the intern take your pulse
and wondered if he was shy or right
when he said you were gone.
On the form for your flight from ICU
to morgue to mortician to oven, to me,
I guessed you were a hundred pounds,
so light you could be made of helium.
You could be made of air
and be everywhere.
Of a world made of so many unlikely things,
of the mongoose’s ability to kill
the cobra, of consciousness,
of time before the beginning,
before the two of us, of death, I see you
enter the light above my shoulder
and read what I’ve written.
All this for you. This alphabet
you shed in June, this word
and the next and this final sentence
a fence of roses that can only be you.

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Jen McClanaghan’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Narrative. She is the author of River Legs, selected by Nikky Finney for the Kore Press First Book Award.