February 2021
Bio Note: Although I´m a happily married woman, I have the tendency to indulge my imagination in
poems of lost love, hopeless love, perhaps as a way of assuaging the anguish of my youth, all those years of
romantic misadventure, or perhaps because I find it nearly impossible to write a happy poem most of the time.
A forthcoming chapbook, The Places We Empty, is due out in July 2021.
Birthday Present
I wanted to give you something beautiful, something that would fit in the palm of your hand. Something to worry over when misfortune struck or slip under your pillow before disappearing into a labyrinth of dreams. Once, when your body still melted to glow at the slightest stroke of my fingers, I gave you a moonstone, washed smooth, I said, by the ebb and flow of my love. In the beginning, there was this, earthly treasures wrapped in tissue paper or slivers of silk, poetry exchanged in the places we opened to each other, the giant maple outside your bedroom trembling against the glass. We switched off all your clocks hoping to halt time, but time sent you spiraling out of my embrace, anyway. Little by little, your presents became predictable then sporadic then hypothetical; little by little you started burrowing into the shadows of the night while I lay awake beside you, staring out the window, searching for a sign, a flash of light that might give shape to your silences. I thought that by unfurling the layers of the universe, I would find all your unspoken words floating amongst the stars, like cosmic dust. As you shifted under the sheets, lips pressed, brow knit into a calligraphy I couldn´t understand, I would hold my breath and listen to the sky exhaling a million glittering wishes. So many times, I wanted to sway you out of slumber, cup your face and say, look: my love, illuminating the whole of the earth. So many times, I cried myself to sleep. It was your birthday and I wanted to give you something beautiful, something that would symbolize the tide breaking against my heart, something to light your way back into my embrace, a treasure swept onto the shore where we met, where I saw you placing a glimmer of moonstones in her outstretched hands.
Originally published in Voices of Eve (defunct)
©2021 Julie Weiss
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