by Sophie Klahr
we’d rent the coastal room in an attempt
to say goodbye again as if eros-
ion could help us to undo what we had
done again we’d try to craft an ending
eat cheap potato chips and cottage cheese
the way he did the year his mother died
cradling her gun and the sound pushed him off-
shore... each room strangulation and harbor
we tried one day I’ll leave not you but all
this: those rooms that had never been under
my name the way I could run my hand in
longing to conjure a body I knew
so well I thought it home. where o? we left
all that we made our bed and lied in it
“I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” begins a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. For five years, I had an affair with another writer, also a poet. In years since, writing sonnets has offered “a momentary stay against confusion,” as Frost suggests poems might. Engaging meter is a type of meditation, a psychic shelter. One’s history is embedded in the present, and when deep trauma is a piece of that history, the past can rule the present almost as if on puppet strings. Sometimes you can see the strings, and sometimes you can’t. It happened too that language would slip between us sometimes, a bright thread we each claimed—it happens here. Isn’t that a game show—Whose Line Is It Anyway? Motel rooms were rare for us, but it was mostly in these rooms that we’d try to break up. This poem is a missive from the other side of one of those doors. Willingness is the key.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery. Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI and other publications.