Now That You're Nowhere — Blackbird Archive

← v19n1, Spring 2020

Now That You’re Nowhere

anyone on earth can find you,

I find you here,

in age-softened envelopes

postmarked Par Avion,

of my mother’s closet

beneath stacks of frayed

linens. Goddess, you write,

I was stunned to find

you’d changed the locks.

Now that you’re nothing

but black ink, your familiar

hand elegant, precise,

at first, as printer’s type,

then falling apart,

as you did, toward the end

of each letter, growing

larger, loopy, spilling down

the pages, you’re these words

I shouldn’t read, but do:

you’re hungry and ill,

casino, motel. You’re jail.

You’re poison in the glove box,

shirts and ties she took.

You’re sorrow and sorry.

You’re rage. I never knew,

you write, you hated me so much

you couldn’t bear to leave

me even my razor. Please don’t

write me anymore about my

children. Check soon.

grief family memory

Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her poetry collection Muse from Southern Illinois University Press won the 2003 Levis Reading Prize and the 2003 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A two-time winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council (1997, 2000) she is also a recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Artist Fellowship (2003). Recent poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Provincetown Arts, and Maggid , and translations of several of her poems into Mandarin by Chinese poet Luye have recently appeared in the Chinese literary journals Poetry Forest and Chinese-Western Poetry. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001).