My Life as a Lover by Mary McGinnis
I claim it with my fingertips; tonight they are cold, my ears remembering rain, I claim it with my voice, husky, lower than it used to be. I claim it with my arms, with my elbows that can hold nothing, with determination, with my Clark’s sandals flapping through rain, with my nose for intrigue. It is my love of pears that keeps me in this life, my love of flat stones from a beach in Cape May, New Jersey; sand dollars, mesquite chips, petrified wood abandoned on a windowsill; a friend’s hair full of wind and sun, a blue plate from a friend I rarely see— it’s a moment of comfort holding another poet’s hand as we leave a reading, it’s rain in air, tiny bits of gravel that end up in my kitchen: they keep me here in my incarnation as a lover.
116 Santa Fe Literary Review