John Wrote to Me, Honey come home & notice word & meaning of ink is blue: notice how words glide, one by one, how a word walks into town . . . amandum “loving”—how words mutter, it’s raining & wonder why wind = air vs. wind = turn & notice world class word, effortless & pitch- perfect, hyperbole happy (thankee koindly, sir) & many happy returns & aren’t they awfully pretty? words unbound like child-voiced Dada, allgone, look— & see world in word— It was John who wrote this to me.
Words that Fell from the Sky Well, I just stopped thinking should have. Just stopped. You know you could call this not being afraid to live with or without you, remembering the angle we held our pens, along the length of our fingers & the height & base of what we wrote as the weight of it ran dry into the words we pressed into the next page, turning like a page turns or bending like a spine bends & sometimes wanting to be not turning, not bending & the older we get this is what we are, or should be, living as if now was never going to be (flowering in back of us down the street) over.
Reasons to Stay He landed in the slush pile for sale with her and the glad bags, the stars & the moon—Do I tell, do I tell, do I tell?— They’ll tell you he brought her perfume for fire, & for blue stone, broken sky, with an eye on to stay, to lift his eyes to the last horizon, turning toward home, he thought, included her, and he drove solo no longer on the crisscross highway into what goes by.
sweet william, June
Once, it seemed, her life depended on naming them:
sweet william, June; obedience, August; black-eyed susans,
all morning, a bride smokes in her bed. She will not
dance or put on her veil. And so, her mother pours tea
for her. She refuses milk, sugar—the dog
shits the floor. She says everything will die if
she doesn’t water it. She’s convinced she’ll burn
in her sleep, so she’s taken apart the stove
to put out the pilot light. I won’t be going anywhere,
she tells her mother, I’m happy enough.
And later,
. . . at the wedding feast, God sees
everything: common rosemary, whiskey mac—
her mother’s empty glass, her father filling it.
And all the guests dancing.
Our Lucky, or Unlucky Lost— of whom we ever speak. Each & I & more than I, my prayers, recount the time when I postponed a world for Ohio, a city for a house, a house for a mechanic, a child for a girl, falling, unhurt—she should end up with us & I turn to remember as I recall, I do: In this attic-shock of memories—it’s nothing but history, at the beginning of the day, on Monday, only a day. It leaves us with good Friday minutes & tale-spin stress, odds & ends of heaven. Is that you? Is that who, where, you are? Searching your phone, happy into who, into what? To leave you alone—to call me with any.
*****
Ellen McHugh is a former adjunct instructor of English Composition at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio; while teaching at Lakeland, she also served on the editorial staff of the school’s online literary journal, the Chagrin River Review. She holds an MA in English from Cleveland State University; several of her poems have been published in Cleveland State’s Whiskey Island magazine. Presently, she works as a registered nurse at John Carroll University’s Student Health Center, prior to this, as an emergency room nurse at Cleveland Clinic, Euclid Hospital.
