COLLECTING

MERIWETHER JOYNER | VERMONT

I’ve been reading the collection of poems I made after I ended things again.

I never told you about it I think you would have thought it strange.

my need to bind them up to title it to order our poems into a story just as I was saying goodbye. but i needed to be able to remember like a mother returning once a year to the chest that holds her child’s blanket, favorite stuffed animal, the dress with the stain from that picnic just to hold them a minute and know that it was real. your poems are still my favorite—you have such a way with final lines. I come back to the siren one more than the others a thin, snaking composure—just a word or two on each line a silhouette of me standing at the door. I hope you remember.

I never thought of myself as a siren, never saw myself in that way.

And for as many times as I return to it, I am never her.

But I am there in the poem;

I know this treachery of body all too well – this betrayal. So maybe it will make sense to you if I say our poems are my siren’s song and every now and again, all I ask is to be led to the rocks to be drowned by them to let them remind me I am alive and that I will be washed ashore again.