by Wendy Drexler

—with a line by Marguerite Yourcenar


The candle isn’t bothered by the flame, light doesn’t complain
when swallowed by dusk, pebbles don’t mourn the mountain
they’ve crumbled from, mountain lions fatten on feral burrows
that are wrecking wetlands, the Australian crocodile that makes
a fine meal of feral pigs doesn’t know it’s endangered,
the pigs don’t know they’re invasive, we’re all ravenous, cascading
tragedies, dipping into glimmers of relief, gripping the flywheel,
trying to get by, sorting angels from villains, poachers from
preachers, loners from shooters, all of us wreathed in this
sorry mixture of blood and lymph. I mean, look at me, shelling
invasive Asian tiger shrimp for dinner, tearing off the soft
swimmerets that once streamed seaweed and brooded eggs,
slitting the fleshly crescent with a paring knife as my thumbnail
scrapes the thin white vein that once carried the colorless blood.

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Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. She’s been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club.

by Wendy Drexler

They plucked you out before you could kill me.
I had to make a clean sweep. Forgive me,

conductor of my train to the future—
my artist daughter of long fingers

and kindness, my son with his kilowatt wit
and quiver of dreams. You were my gardener,

my stockpot, my pantry, your shelves
filled with my lifetime supply.

My arbor, predesigned, assigned at birth.
My divine egg timer, my clock that never

needed winding. You were my pinkish-gray,
almond-shaped, and my God, you were brave,

wore menstruation like a brightly flowered dress.
And the bloody labor of your fields.

Your timely hatchery, your drop-down
deliveries, your tubes swaying like anemones.

I, too, thought we could wither together
into gentle senescence. Forgive me

for evicting you in your dotage, not even
a hearing, your desk cleared in an hour,

everything you’d ever carried weighing
just over two ounces. Forgive me,

you who were my wheelhouse, my work
horse, my backfill, my unpaid laborer.

You, who toiled decades deep in the mine of me.

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Wendy Drexler is a 2022 recipient of an artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. She's been the poet-in-residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and the programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published this September by Terrapin Books.