42opus
is an online magazine of the literary arts.
25 May 2009 | Vol. 9, No. 1
Dear ________,
By the time I finished writing, you had disappeared inside me. An absence bounded by the imagined shape of your skin. The body only token of the thought that creates it, yet I counted years by those touches, those bruised moments of light. Plankton sparking in the suffocating cold. I opened the ocean's windows against the lateness of night up there, looking for phosphorescence dripped from the season. I didn't want to make you the referent of my theological longings. Your absence a set of coordinates marked on a brittle map. X receding pleasantly ahead. My moral compass skittered. Somewhere over Canada (O Canada, more Joni Mitchell than anthem) the swish of water counter-clockwise toward magnetic north. To drive all night again, and to love everything.
About the author:
MC Hyland's latest chapbook, Residential As In, was released this winter by Blue Hour Press. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, LIT, H_NGM_N, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches creative writing and letterpress through local nonprofits and runs DoubleCross Press.
Source:
http://42opus.com/v9n1/dear
