The Projectionist
In my dream,
he’s a projectionist
at an empty theater
and I am winding
the long staircase
to his stadium
of red high-backed chairs
waiting for something
to fill them.
In this dream,
we are still in love,
and he is queueing Alice
for us, the screen flickering
from black to the strange
forests of green
only real in film.
He latches his arm
around my shoulders,
and out of all that darkness
comes a single
wedge of light.
On the Third Month of Separation
“Well,” Alice thought to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall
think nothing of tumbling down-stairs!”
In the South, sometimes heat
is the closest thing to love.
The days reduced to wet
blanket air and fearless
waterbugs. In this new absence
called separation, I have become
night-bound with voices
in a phone and three-dollar
chardonnay. The first day,
I drink myself to blindness, fall
through the lighted doorway
into an empty living room.
When I wake, the bruise sails
like Australia up my thigh. I don’t
want to think about fairy tales,
but I do, trained as a seal
on wet-eyed children’s promises,
the cynicism
of bootstraps and karma.
We all know, in this world,
nothing is untoothed. Satiated.
July
There is only one shirt still hanging
in his closet. A red button-down
that somehow eluded my whiskey-
licked packing. Everything his
turned out to the shed,
those plastic doors gaping
into the gray cave of his belongings—
an oversized microwave, crystal
wine glasses he filched from work.
Every time I mow our lawn, I open
this mouth and gaze inside—
it consumes everything
delicately, a tiny box
of paperwork, laundry baskets
laced with pillowcases and sheets.
Why won’t he come for them? Two months
gone and I cleave more of him
from our home every day.
And when I call, his phone is lifeless
in another state. Before the bans,
all respectable families burned their lawns.
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which will be re-released from Zoetic Press later this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.
