SYNONYMS FOR LOSS
I can’t remember the address. I arrive on a boat in the rain. There’s a band aid with a blood stain in the ferry sink. I try to get lost at the terminal but fail. I share a cab with some of the women you’d slept with.
More photos of you up on easels around the room. It’s raining. Your friends slide up to tell me I shouldn’t have come. A woman acts as if she has never met me, as if we had not planned a wedding salad together. Sarah whispers, They’re probably scared of your tattoos.
Your mother sits in front, smiling the whole time. You would have told me, “She’s happy I got what I deserved.” It’s raining; the ceiling fan is broken. The windows panes, tiny diamond shapes, fog until I can’t even see. The rain makes a soft sound on the magnolia leaves and the small dogwoods and the obscenely green grass and I want to stand outside, curl up on the grass in my black skirt.
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CHRISTINE HAMM has a PhD in American Poetics, and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at Pace. Echo Park, her third book of poems, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011. The New Orleans Review published Christine’s latest chapbook, A is for Absence, in the fall of 2014, and nominated her work for a Pushcart.
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Read more by Christine Hamm
Poem in The Coachella Review
Three poems in Glasgow Review of Books
Poem in Rattle