Dylan Harbison

July

My friend Virginia is falling in love and I’m learning
to live in my body again. Some days I wake

and just get in my car and drive, because why not
there’s nothing and no one to stop me. For the first time

I’m unequivocally alone. There’s this place in the road
where switchbacks break into open fields

and the sky looks like an invitation. All my life
I thought I was a vessel for grief. I looked too long

in the mirror, reached for everything sharp.
Sometimes my only blot of happiness a man

I didn’t love. But something new is blooming.
I feel it in the morning when I drive between pastures

road straight as the barrel of a gun. After dinner
when I drag my lawn chair into the street to watch birds

make shapes above the basilica. In the dark
when I let you wear my body like a borrowed gown.

At first I didn’t know what it was.
Joy, rising inside me like heat.

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Dylan Harbison is a writer from Burlington, Vermont. She now lives in Western North Carolina, where she studies creative writing at UNC Asheville and runs Meter & Melody, a local poetry series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Offing, Prelude Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She loves tercets and sitting on porch swings late at night.