Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash
When Will was lost at sea, or mostly lost,
all but one shard of bone, and the day
after we’d smoked so many cigarettes
at that table with the flowers and the view,
the peppercorns I’d find for months,
the complicated dishes and shiny knives,
his wife out east, his daughter, and him
holding court, the swirl of wine, its legs,
and how for months I tried to write it,
then years, then the summer in Prague
when I thought I’d seen him, how I
followed him down the alley, me, a woman,
and the evening already dark, and the man
who turned to me, and I said, in English,
I’m sorry, I mistook you for someone,
someone gone, and in Czech he scolded me,
probably something about being a woman,
it being night, about danger, whore,
stupid, stupid, and me just repeating I’m sorry.
What did I do next? Treated myself
to a quarter of a duck and stewed plums,
many dark beers. So many years. And
what might we eat if those who died
came to dine with us? After Valentina,
I remember, she visited my dream,
and we sat at a different table. Was it tea?
I think we had tea. And Jim, we sometimes
feast in open air. A carafe of water. Lemons.
Here, today, alone, I pick at chopped cabbage,
hazelnuts from Tupperware, my paper towel
halved, the heat pump broken. Mid-February,
and all my companions wear snowflakes
in their hair. O air. What once was here—
sunlight through the west window,
the spoons clanging against the crockery.
Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment will be published by Terrapin Books in 2023. Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.