Not Quite Nostalgia

But longing
for a place
you never quite knew,
the way tu me manque
means you are missing from me,
an uneasiness
of not finding
yourself
whole,
in one place
or another.
Whose past cities
do not haunt them
like a lover,
even a bland one,
easily left behind?
Waxy magnolia blooms
as big as a baby’s head
remind me of a home
I never claimed as such.
Too humid, wrong vernacular.
I couldn’t sense
how sweet it was
until the windows
shut for winter.

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Rebekah Denison Hewitt earned an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she held the Martha Meier Renk Graduate Fellowship. She is an assistant editor for Orison Books, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and The Rumpus. She lives in Wisconsin with her family and works as a librarian.