Poetry by Madeline Simms

✧ Writer’s Regimen Contest Winner ✧

Meetinghouse Hill, Roxbury, Massachusetts (1799), John Ritto Penniman

un

“Until the dying one says Dream, undream me.”

-Marianne Boruch

the living one the opposite of until: before

his chalk-dry & wild tongue spewed

the unlanguage of monarchs

& the equally banished, the dementia patient

said nothing: wandered blue halls until

afternoon sun led him to a cloud

like a cartoon, he thought: called me his daughter’s

name & I replied to this unmemory, remember when

you carried me to school on your shoulders?

squinted like he did, moments until

the strain became a smile: in another life, lifted

scabby legs a yoke around a younger neck:

they never did but dwelling in our lack: never but

between: two strangers padding our differences

with tall tales of care until a visitor called

him uncle: her own journey with him driving stick-shift

and his? bad sieve of yesterday: the gift-wrapped lie

becomes what’s shared, a photograph: the difference

between truth and untruth is a gaping want: un, or deprived of

something like a hand-held walk to school or the stalled engine

of an unfinished poem: clutching all the same.

Realing, or a cure

for Andrea

And what of loneliness? I ask the cards,

the two of pentacles steadying

like a balancing act. I once loved a clown

who wore many painted faces, each one juggling

almost anything: February clementines, dirty rags,

my shy hand amidst each revolving

door of him. All juggling is a balancing, but not

all balancing succeeds. And so he left me

bruised fruit and one of many faces,

the one he called Pierrots or

“avatar of the disenfranchised” performing unmasked

and miming lonely. Suppose Pierrots becomes you,

suppose to mime is not pretense but

practice. As a child, I refined a seven-course meal

of fake grapes and steak. With each return

from the Fischer-Price kitchen, I brought the opposite

of loneliness to the table: a Velcro avocado

for Andrea’s empty hands, performed eating

with vigor, please and thank you. Taught each other

a meal is more than food as we giggled over plastic

cake for dessert. When the cards call out imbalance,

I call Andrea. They’re in the kitchen, chopping

onions over tears, how I’ve miss you I say

into the phone, real soup bubbling on the stove.

MADELINE SIMMS is a cornfed creative from Illinois. She is currently based in Tuscaloosa, AL where she's working toward a dual MFA in Creative Writing and Book Arts. Madeline is the recipient of the 2023 AWP Intro Award in Fiction. You can find her writing in Poet Lore, Quarterly West, The Journal, and elsewhere.