Bess Cooley
There’s this never-ending rain now, never-ending
thoughts of how we might leave each other. At night we both dream of it—
separate nights. Mine (us in the woods together, you kissing someone else)
comes after
you tell me of yours. We each wake twice in one week, snuggling close,
only then admitting how in our dreams the other person left us—there is
always some
other man or woman. We joke: You have to do the dishes because
you left me last night, though we don’t give specifics (you in the white
cathedral-like forest walking away on snowshoes). I am trying to relive
real winters: snow on snow. I dream of white snow and cold winds and you.
Moving south
everyone said I’d love the short, warm, wet winters but instead
I long for frozen hair, frozen snot, trying to breathe against frigid.
When this summer humid air sticks to my body and sits in my lungs
I won’t go outside. It will be winter-like in that, its unbearableness.
In that it won’t let up for a long time. In that we will either leave each other
or we won’t. Old anxieties splitting their seams, stitches tearing open to spill
neither of us
are good enough, we are only worthy of the best people walking away through
a forest, we are
not worthy of anyone sleeping all night beside us under heavy cover, of waking
at all rested
all over the garden beds. It is still February and there are birds. Crows on
our soggy lawn.
Geese in the streets. The buds not frozen or in hibernation but still
waiting to draw out of their stems.
Bess Cooley won the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is also co-editor of Peatsmoke: A Literary Journal. She lives in Knoxville and teaches at the University of Tennessee.