Postcard
by Lucy Wainger
Dear Reader, I hit a deer today,
split my fist bloody on its antler.
I’m writing to tell you exactly what I mean,
I touched a girl in the garden, felt nothing
of the ants crawling into my jeans.
If I built you a sand castle, would you
wash it away? If I built you a precinct,
would you tranquilize the guards?
I want to ask if you’d believe me,
or at least in me,
or at least try to. I want to ask
what you’d let live
in your basement. Dear Reader,
I cannot show you what remains of the body,
I cannot remove surgically the thing in me
that smells like drowning. No matter
how small the postcard, each time
I write to you, I have to start over—
split atoms, separate water
from oil, left hand from right:
create the distance
through which to tell you
I don’t know if I can trust you
not to kill me. I don’t know
where we go from here.
split my fist bloody on its antler.
I’m writing to tell you exactly what I mean,
I touched a girl in the garden, felt nothing
of the ants crawling into my jeans.
If I built you a sand castle, would you
wash it away? If I built you a precinct,
would you tranquilize the guards?
I want to ask if you’d believe me,
or at least in me,
or at least try to. I want to ask
what you’d let live
in your basement. Dear Reader,
I cannot show you what remains of the body,
I cannot remove surgically the thing in me
that smells like drowning. No matter
how small the postcard, each time
I write to you, I have to start over—
split atoms, separate water
from oil, left hand from right:
create the distance
through which to tell you
I don’t know if I can trust you
not to kill me. I don’t know
where we go from here.
Lucy Wainger's poems appear or will appear in Best American Poetry 2017, The Collagist, Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She studies creative writing at Emory University, where she received the 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize.