Unsent Postcard
By Ali Shapiro
Published in CutBank 78
It’s not that I miss you, I just want to keep
telling you everything. How the girls here
are lovely, and covered
in paint, but they don’t do to me
what they used to. How the mountains hold ghosts
of your tent, our fire, hunters neon
as tropical fish. Today I walked uphill
out of town and then uphill
back home, the whole time thinking,
Don’t go, don’t go, but to no one
in particular. It’s not that I’m lonely, it’s just
things are slightly peculiar—the barn’s
crooked smile of windows, its mouthful
of cows, the bridge that straddles
the river that keeps going,
shhhh. I’m quiet, I’m
quiet. Talk to the birds, the shuddering
trucks, the cicadas back from the dead to tell us
everything. I’m telling you, all long tall things
bring your body back to me, the muscular
tree trunks, their hard
brown arms, and the one struck
by lightning whose wound I keep wanting
to tend. And the clouds, of course, but you can’t
trust clouds, they’re as bad
as my mind, which also
keeps changing, going, Rabbit,
no, bear. It’s not that I wish
you were here, it’s just—it’s
the deer, they keep hurling themselves
at my car in the night, but I’m fine, fine, it’s just
it’s a zillion degrees in the sun and I can’t
bear swimming, how the current keeps touching me
everywhere at once like your hands.
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Ali Shapiro is a recent graduate of the MFA program in poetry at the University of Michigan. Her poems have been published in RATTLE, Redivider, Linebreak, PANK, and Cutbank, and her posts are regularly featured on the Ploughshares blog. She's the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center, and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes in various denominations. The Wigs, her webcomic exploring the ambiguous relationship between two guinea pigs wearing clown noses, can be found at otherwig.com.