"I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house." by Donika Kelly

November 10, 2023

I love you. I miss you.
Please get out of my house.

Donika Kelly

Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.

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“This poem is about the pleasures of being partnered and our mutual need for alone time. What’s possible in the missing. How necessary the space.”
―Donika Kelly

Donika Kelly is a Black writer and the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021). She is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa.

The Renunciations
(Graywolf Press, 2021)

“The Dance” by Wendell Berry
read more

“Audience” by Rachel Levitsky
read more

Thanks to Steve Bellin-Oka, author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Bellin-Oka’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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