On Her Leaving
Once, a man called us the original sin.
I call what we were my attempt to walk
on the roughest water. I wanted to give
you the husk of me, run your fingers
along this jagged canyon, put them in
the deepest fissures, the traces of who
and what I have survived. I cannot call
love a journey, but a becoming. My body
will not last. I have no marbled torso
that will inspire the poet to change.
What I offered you was my dying.
From my ashes, no elegant bird could rise.
I had no gold, but I had this moment:
my palm running flat against the ascension
of your back and stunning fear, my eyes
following the cartographies of scars
between our naked bodies. As we held
each other in passion, you realized what
was to become of us if we were to hold on
too long. You looked back at me once
before you took the last fire of summer.
I Left My Heart in the Fragrance
of those roses I sent you. I imagine them
on your table in the same dim lighting
you kissed me in for the first time—
Marvin Gaye blaring in the background
wailing about losing his woman
and you leaning in to cup my face.
I kept my eyes open. You were that stunning.
By then, I had already lost so much—
Why miss the sun flaring its axiomatic brilliance
toward us, highlighting the amber in your hair?
When I held you, I was flame and once
I looked into your eyes, I had to face myself,
face the history of each terrifying moment
I had not survived. I would not survive
the way you were to exit the sky of my life—
would cause each lonely wound in the firmament
to collide and make the day a perpetual night—
make me more ruin than person.
I have lost everything I loved before
I knew I had it: My mother and her sustenance
clipped too soon from the umbilical cord.
Nana’s U-shaped eyes, the way she shouted
I love you when she knew I wouldn’t make it home
before she died. My sister’s leaving, her arms
around my neck, her soft whispers in my ear—
BooBoo, be good for Mommy. When I held you,
I was determined not to lose again.
This was my first mistake—
You were the rain I tried to collect without
a bucket, the moon eclipsing the sun,
a shadow cast I was never able to capture.
What is the Opposite of Lonely?
It is ocher sunlight scaling the curtains
like spiders with the intent to forge a web.
The Sea of Cortez’s descant in evening.
The symmetry we make even in this mess
of white bedding—our bodies naked,
tangled, made plain in this sacral act
of affection. It is the way you look at me
and I become glass—translucent, breakable.
Your hand taking the sun’s direction—
sinking into me, providing a warmth I can
neither name nor place in the beat of my heart.
It is the words I have carried in the gourd
of my hurt, the book I thought to leave
at your bedside as you slept. It is where
I have written the cryptic and green
journey of the way I feel for you without
the obligation of precision. It is what I can
manage only to sing when you look at me
this way—with eyes that cut and sting
with all this love. It is these songs I enlist
to say what I have been too afraid to speak
for fear I will evaporate in this light.
It is you looking there in my most secret,
pained place—where the child foregoes
her need to run from everything she wants
but thought she could never have.
Element of Cloud
I won’t call this grey morning ours,
though it feels like it. Our hands
still learning how and where to touch
each other this way—in sleep.
We hold painful positions as to not
disturb each other: my arm caught
numb cradling your gentle head then
when I can’t take it anymore,
your chest, steaming with sweat, is
where you insist I lay my head.
We hold our breath the way these clouds
bear water before rain—everything
we can’t say stored in the cumulonimbus
of ourselves. In our bed, we dapple
fingerprints on each other’s black skin
waiting for downpour—the time
to name what we’ve been holding
here, together in the flanking line.
A Cave Canem fellow, E. Hughes received their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, RHINO Poetry, The Offing, and Wildness Magazine—among others. They have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 92Y Discovery Contest. They were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Currently, they are a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University.
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