Green Linden Press

During Lockdown, I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again

Last night my daughter cried at bedtime.
Of loneliness, she said. She’s seen the graph,
the jagged mountain we need to press
into a meadow, and maybe she pictures
the drive home from southern Ohio,
how the green hills flatten without us
doing a damn thing. No sacrifice required.
I tell her the steep peak makes loneliness
our work, makes an honorable task of it.
But I shut myself in the bathroom and cry, hard,
into a hand towel. I walk alone in the snow,
squinting up into the big, wet flakes,
letting them bathe my face. I tell myself
it is a kind of touch. I tell myself it will do.

(Named by Entropy Magazine one of the best poems online in 2020–21.)

Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Her latest book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2020), a collection of essays and quotes, is a national bestseller. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, POETRY, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020