A woman sits on the front porch – delicate
seaweed hair, conch shell eyes, lips breaching
whales. She eats old notebooks, broken zip
drives, locks of hair that taste of salt and
rose petals. The dog walks through her, the birds
never notice. My roommates thought it a gag
the one time I asked who is that? They said:
is this a reference? your ghost stories again?
If she is a ghost, she is one I feed
discarded poems, washed down
with the rain water wine bottle
the roommates keep on the porch.
I am you in twenty months, the woman croaks,
when you walk into the sea. The sailors will find
paper in your chest, a message bottled in
your Oma’s obituary. Do I remember feeding
juice to a dying woman? Soft-skinned hands clutch
a blanket and she calls for her daughter.
Her daughter, who helped me tear apart an empty house –
a hand-sewn quilt missing. The quilt was the only keepsake
I wanted. It left a hole in my heart not healed by
all the other quilts I stole, quilts I used to cover the woman
in hospice, the same woman from the porch who eats
poems. She repeats her meals back –
and maybe if I press words against her ear,
other dead will hear my verse, too, will sleep
as their living daughters sing them lullabies
in tune with heart monitors and cups of jello.
Samantha Chianese’s poetry centers on mental health and sexuality. She received her MFA from the University of South Florida, where she taught poetry and composition and worked for Saw Palm as a poetry editor, production editor, and contributor to “Reviews” and “Places to Stand.” She is the runner-up for Helix’s 2024 Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize, was nominated for the 2023 Best New Poets Award, and is published in Poetry and The American Journal of Poetry.