Devotion

By ELIZABETH SCANLON

 

Your mother is a creep.
Everyone’s mother is a creep;
we have envelopes of your teeth in our bedside drawers,
clippings of your hair. We check your browser history.
Listen to your footsteps in the night back and forth to the bathroom,
listen even harder if you’re in there too long.
The self is a recent construct, relatively;
a hundred years ago there were far fewer
ways to say mine. Your clothes we sniff.
Try to guess what you want for dinner,
what you had for lunch.
In the I and Thou model, all meaning stems from relationships,
the other the stand-in for the God, who is always absent.
We try to take your picture when you’re not looking.
Every thing we warn you about,
we are.

 

[Purchase Issue 21 here.]

 

Elizabeth Scanlon is the editor of The American Poetry Review. She is the author of Lonesome Gnosis, The Brain Is Not the United States (The Brain Is the Ocean), and Odd Regard.

Devotion

Related Posts

Mantra 5

KRIKOR BELEDIAN
from channel to channel / the lengthening beauty of shadows that float and bow down / and suck at the stones and planks / of the damp, bitter fog / of loneliness, / stone horses let loose their golden neighs / and the waters transform to / stained glass

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

RAFAEL ALBERTI
Who are you, tell us, who do not remember you / from earth or from heaven? // Your shadow—tell us—is from what space? / What light, say it, has reached / into our realm? // Where do you come from, tell us, / shadow without words, / that we don’t remember you?

The Old Current Book Cover

January 2025 Poetry Feature #1: Brad Leithauser

BRAD LEITHAUSER
I’m twenty-seven, maybe too old to be / Upended by this, the manifold / Foreignness of it all, the fulfilling / Queer grandeur of it all, // But we each come into ourselves / As each can, in our own / Unmetered time (our own sweet way), / And for me this day’s more thrilling