when absence is my country

Michael Battisto

through a harvest of red stigmas 

from flowers dependent on human

hands i walked across a city

made of saltpeter along the borders

of speech then followed the road

through every november to my mother’s

house beside pillars of smoke and

signboards selling the future to ask

for a single bundle of apples or the coat

my childhood abandoned in the dew

but instead of her body only these

iron scissors hanging over the door

and a message from her footsteps

calling me her secret and here my old

medicine discordant music a kit

of broken piano strings and through

the one window dry wheat sheaves

clicking towards the east so that

is the way some death is coming

to feed me words like myrrh like

family like sacrifice like home

Writer’s Notebook

I read The Song of Songs constantly as a child. I wrote this poem after rereading it again for the first time in many years. Though the language is reminiscent of that in Songs, the landscape the speaker moves through is quite the opposite. A more contemporary one. The speaker does not even attempt to call out for the Beloved. They may no longer believe in such a concept. But they still hoped to find someone in their childhood home.

about the writer