Last night I died
and as if I’d
been arrested and
treated with some
dignity, I got
one last phone call before
the doors shut.
And knowing what
my mother already
knows, having pressed
her palm against
her mother’s rattling—
that lungs bear
the final cost,
that daughters don’t
ever leave—
I called you instead.
I’m sorry for
the unwrought clay of
this flesh, how I
squandered all
the things you
begged me not to.
Minutes in which
to work, to walk
the gold-lit Fresh
Pond reservoir.
I’m sorry that I
tapped out before
we hit 50.
Let me bequeath
to you this
archive of
approximate children.
Some poems.
Some recipes I
imagined and
prepared for us, standing
at your stove until
my womb held
nothing but ache.
I went through this
swift life beside you.
Women we know
have married for so
much less. Crossed
land. Packed their
material goods.
Lacquered lampshades,
crumbling paperback
romances, junk drawers
fish-scaled with
loose change.
What is she worth,
the friend who’s spent
decades learning
to love you?
Please.
Pick up the phone.
I must tell you I
would have left any
of the towns I still
call home
to wake up in Chicago,
complain about
the inferior yogurt,
never as good
as from the farms in
Massachusetts,
and drink this
black coffee.
The fancy kind
we brew using three
discrete measures:
weight and weight
and time.
Amanda Gunn’s debut poetry collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was published by Copper Canyon Press. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copy editor for 13 years before earning an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She is the recipient of the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. She is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Harvard.