Wendy Mnookin
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Wendy Mnookin’s most recent book is The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, published by BOA Editions in 2008. Her other books are What He Took and To Get Here, also from BOA Editions, and Guenever Speaks, a collection of persona poems. Her poems appear in journals, including The Greensboro Review, Harvard Review, POOL, Prairie Schooner and Rhino, and anthologies, including Boomer Girls and Urban Nature.
Mnookin received a book award from the New England Poetry Club and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She graduated from Radcliffe College and the Vermont College MFA Program. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and Grub Street, a non-profit Boston writing program. You can find out more about her writing at:
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Anything Warm
Anything warm is warm.
Anything red has something to say.
Anything that drifts also smudges,
like secrets. That intense.
Anything loose is a message,
endless, and endlessly enticing.
Anything narrow gets there first.
Especially anger. Anything watery
pleads, though the story stays
buried under its layers, obscuring
whatever it is we’ve done
to deserve this. In the eternal life
of regret, Sunday looks back.
Monday is certainty,
with a mystery inside out.
Anything two days in a row
sings the same song I do
without repeating the first verse.
Because there is no return.
That seems dramatic, but likely.
Just look at the waves,
all moving in one direction.
It made Noah crazy!
Another day—hell, another
hour—he’d be ready
to wring that dove’s neck.
What right did she have
to exhaustion, to twittery musings?
One declarative sentence
would be a relief.
Rental
The children spend hours
peeling sunburnt skin from each other’s backs.
I lie on the deck, astounded
by red, roses draping over the trellis,
heavy as fruit.
Sand castles grow more elaborate—
winding moats, turrets.
Come in, come in, it’s time for dinner,
my voice lost in the greed of ocean air.
You walk along the beach,
down where waves harden the sand
and make it easier to grip.
At night I dream you keep walking
until you disappear beyond the last piling.
The dream tells me you’re dead
so I can’t be angry.
I wake up angry.
Where is the light switch?
Where is a cup for water?
Over the couch, a shawl romanticizes peacocks.
Three flat rocks wait it out in a soap dish.
At Sea
At the end of the jetty.
Where the boats come in. Where the boats go out. At the pile of rocks
that swallows the sun at the end of the day.
At the turn of the trail. At the last dune.
In front of the hot-dog stand. At the door to the pub. By the shanty,
the shipbuilder’s yard, the discarded yellow boots, the smashed clam shells.
You thought I’d give in to despair.
But today is today, everywhere I look. And I look everywhere.
