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      April 2, 2021Dear HusbandAusten Leah Rose

      DEAR HUSBAND

      Yesterday
       
       
      I swam into the center of a dark star, the farthest point
      from every other point,
       
       
      the place
       
       
      where people become shapes along the shore, where a mother
      becomes the idea
       
       
      of a mother, and a sister becomes the idea of a sister.
       
       
      Here, everything is its opposite: trees, buildings, snow, Thursday, music,
      boredom, regret.
       
       
      Dear husband, I have been writing you letters, then erasing them,
      then sending blank pages in the mail
      as if to prove you really are
      married
       
       
      to a ghost. I swear
       
       
      yesterday I dipped my hand in a pool of emptiness
      and dragged up a dead dove. Do you realize what cruelty I’m capable of
       
       
      when you leave me alone like this? Dear husband
       
       
      I am thinking of a house with yellow curtains in a town that no one visits,
      and where it always rains, a child
       
       
      tying his shoelaces at the bottom
      of a staircase.
       
       
      Not this wind that knocks the power lines down.
       
       
      Dear husband
       
       
      yesterday, I unzipped the translucent skin of my tent to watch the mountains
      glow pink somewhere
      in Arizona. I swear
       
       
      I saw a spark
      ignite between two mirrors that faced each other in a field,
       
       
      a silver necklace caught in the bare branches of a tree.

      from #70 - Winter 2020

      Austen Leah Rose

      “Rilke wrote a lot of letters, especially to his wife, Clara. He had to, because he was always running away from her, isolating himself in windswept castles perched on rocks by the sea. I suppose he required a certain amount of distance in order to feel intimacy. In one letter, he describes an ideal relationship: ‘I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.’”