No longer here
I heard older Sicilian widows in the North End of
Boston dress in black forever, rest their elbows
On identical pillows to lean over fire escapes and gossip
The blue jays react
To a chaos I also
Can’t see, a sign is just that, the truth
You haven’t been saying aloud yet, a church bell’s
Perceptible song, a going away song, So long, into the day
Into some ancient map pointing
Into Abundance of Nature
Again the day will be here
Without us, the silver quarter will be a memory
Like a film of a car on fire
Everyone gathering around it
Put her fingers in the silver stream
My memory could be anyone’s, the world’s, and the woods
Have trees black and white
Extremely stark extremely there
Was a beauty we might have recognized it
Before departing
Aloud to each other in the conventional way
When something means something to someone, and you can’t make meaning out of it, How you normally would want to
I had no shape off my shift
I could fit into anything
Whose little baby will you be?
Whose little location?
Of conviction and sound?
I became a late night
Radio host, tired but wanting
To be this one, going out to you
Giving up my shape
Is my shape, in the dark
I was unfixed by a bird dripping
The wet world we are, I knew I wouldn’t be
Of my agreement, I had made myself useful to be loved, a body of water
I keep dipping between
Spirit and world shaky supplication
Various pacts
Which is no reason for not undertaking
My address to you: explain the philosophy to me: it goes
The sun rising is not a given
So we’re all at the party, baring
the clarity of
Could articulation make it true when I was alone I was never
my sex, the faulty wires
Burn the cloud company down, I believe the material world
A reflection of laws it serves to exemplify
So goodbye, pond we poisoned
May you survive our art and knowledge
And the possible conflict between
Arbitrary and ordered, Hello
I can give no explicit account
Of change, how could I?
The world rocks
On our windowsills
Placement in itself has meaning, and violence
Has a musical, small equation, has a house
With silent, deep carpeting I loved to tear and see
The inside of, I peeled the soles off my shoes too
Everyone was lying
So I left to go find out
Discovered the magnolia had rotted in the dash
Data recovered itself sensuously
By losing, Does it begin to get found, as articulate
I mean after dying each wrote their own forms, the small turtle
We moved off the road, who might come right back
Our contradictions are beautiful and I don’t think they outdo us
She asked me what I would be if not a poet
I said an animal. I mean importantly, there are languages
I just don’t speak, I’m unsure who I address when I pray
I don’t know the name of my neighbor, my ancestor
Ashing into a milk carton, moving me so.
❧
“Whose little baby will you be”— Alice Notley
“The material world a reflection of laws it serves to exemplify”— Anne Truitt
Carolyn Ferrucci is a poet and paralegal living in upstate New York. Her first chapbook, Say In The End, was published by Spiral Editions in 2024. Other work has been published in The Cleveland Review, Works & Days (Beautiful Days Press), Spoil (Hilo Press), The Brooklyn Rail, Changes Review, Field Notes, Form IV, and elsewhere. Her second chapbook is forthcoming with Belladonna* Collaborative in May, 2026.