Dear Birmingham

I’ve been visiting again
the cemetery
with a sunken southern corner.

Fish smaller than first teeth, birthed from the soil,
maneuver in the glaze
where rain pools, covering the lowest stones.

            Behind him, in a cracked white tub,
my knees to his sides,
left ear pressed to
the stack of bones in his neck,

I was once so terrified of my own contentment
I bit my shoulder
and drew blood there

                        to the surface—past it—

What I have wanted most
is many lives. One for each longing,
round and separate.

Sometimes I bring figs here, asphyxiating
in plastic, for their distant echo
of your humid, ghost-flesh air
shouldering the leaves—that almost-a-human
air—               

            I was born in autumn
as it fled underground
to be fed to a body
of water that only swallows.

Copyright © 2021 by Gabrielle Bates. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem is haunted, as I am, by my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and other unbreakable tethers. The bivalve form of the poem, with that single line as a hinge in the middle, has been recurring in my work lately. There’s something drawing me to that visual interruption near the halfway point. Love—for another person, a place, the self—requires that we wrestle with limitations. I often go to poetry for that sort of wrestling.”
—Gabrielle Bates