Is it true that grasses
grow forever.
Is it true that stalks
remember the hands
that touch them, that
their roots will drink and
drink from soil
as though the water
would never end.
Is it true that the man
I once knew who touched
grasses like girls
split stalks with his
teeth that he
made even grasses
weep. I remember
his lips against
my own so cold
like we could keep
every secret secret.
If we were like
stalks sliced
at the root. If we
could have been
anything better.
Greenwood
You will drive past the grave—
past dogs, neighbors, moss
slick on oak, all the missing birds between
boughs, shadowed figures lurking, treading
empty. How
I will watch you from the window seat
while the rain is still forecasted to fall
in curtains, lovely
as queen’s lace in winter. I discovered
so unsettling. How I still see living
as I covered myself, roped thick around me, soaked
in rainfall, sweat
as you linger in liquid
a mosquito. A bed of mosquitoes
lingering too long by the fence
and nobody watching. Nobody watching
mosquitoes—
to guard a grave that darkens
by day and darker by night
transforms into an endless tank of bulbous
white
splayed across a windshield, smeared
wings, tires
turning faster, faster along the road
of uneven streetlights, radio whispers
to a passenger seat. I saw
watching me—
I saw you watching me—
scars in the night, invisible pain, a lonesome
voice cajoling a fracturing night
air suspending heavy in the lungs, halting—
lurching. To a stop
that was never my doing. Never my doing. Never—
anything that I know: how the air shifts upon a lie,
how everything decimates itself in time, how a hand
resembles a hand under headlights, how
much blood will grace these roads—
how little we both did in knowing.
Sharon Lin
Sharon Lin is a poet and essayist. Her work appears in The New York Review of Books, Sine Theta, Ghost City Press, and elsewhere and is anthologized in Best New Poets 2021 and Voices of the East Coast (Penmanship Books). She lives in New York City.