Welcome back for Zoeglossia’s Poem of the Week series curated this month by Noa/h Fields.
May 24, 2021
Audio
Listening in the Dark
By Meg Day
View the full text below.
Listening in the Dark
By Meg Day
Even in this light, I can see
your want. A gulley appears
in the hard bare field between
those fenced brows & opens
into shallow beds tilled, temple
to temple, as if the glut of a flood
had been swallowed to reveal
the land’s contour underneath.
Habit—or hurt—has made
your surface smooth (its true
smallholding kept submerged)
& I drink of this drought
like I’m told a new calf gasps
for air when its muzzle is cleaned
of that which had only just
kept it subsisting. Is it still
synesthesia if I have no choice
but to use my eyes as ears? You
laugh then, your teeth fitted
around the steady static grumble
of the sea below us, your eyes
a yes or no question I’ve waited
seasons to seed. Operator, are you
there? My hands have never been
so pleased to be my mouth, so
my mouth can be other things.
The moon is a sickle that swings
despite the plow’s augured return
& in my fingers is your name
I plant again & again in the ground.
Previously published on Poets.org
A white Deaf genderqueer person with short blonde hair and hearing aids is featured in profile on an all-white background, facing left. They are wearing a light blue collared button-down. The photo is lit from the left, casting a shadow across the right side of the image.
Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s recent work can be found in Best American Poetry 2020 & The New York Times. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College.