Lizzie Hutton

The Vantage

Only at your home’s back door you said you’d treat yourself to one.
Sad body—so you’d put it—
holding open just enough 

of that screen door to the outside so the smoke,
both its and yours, plumed up
in shifty spirits to what seemed an endless night. 

Years later we are hurtled forward through November rain
in your warm car on 96.
You speak of moving on 

as we are moved just by the shadowed quiet of your pressing
the pedals at your feet, almost as if this means they don’t exist,
neither the pedals nor your freeing 

slender streams of gasoline
piped safely off from us,
our claims of doing right. 

But thoughts of quitting, thinking better, stay beside the point.
There’s cost to everything, although
I watch you keep this thought arm’s length. 

The difference is back then we took our risks in more directly:
the time you say your live ash dropped
onto your daughter’s inner nape 

as she flew past into the yard,
that one screen door quaking
as the rosy scar took root. But risk travels even 

when the pleasures turn ascetic, I think but don’t remind you. Untouched body.
Wish-lists places.
Grey bird, what you finally see 

the moment that it lifts,
as from a mind,
out of the mountainside’s 

masses of evergreen,
the evergreen in which—even in brightest spring—the shaking dead
hang on, 

and good for what, you’d ask,
wreathed as they are among
the plumpest needle buds, whatever’s new.

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Lizzie Hutton's book of poetry, She'd Waited Millennia, was published as Editor's Choice by New Issues Press. Her poems have appeared in journals including the Harvard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Interim, NELLE, Florida Review (where she also won the Humboldt Prize) and Sycamore Review (as winner of the Wabash Prize). Lizzie is currently an assistant professor at Miami University, where she also directs the Howe Writing Center.