studied sonnets on a chaise lounge in Charleston. Each small
song clarified the couplet, the fevered rhetoric of two held
together, in the rental car, on the long drive south. Each day
we were more married, more varied in how we touched. It once
made me sad. That much would be lost, and soon—Nothing but
tenderness and pleasure, Samuel Johnson defined that first honeyed
mouth against the waning moon. On time, Shakespeare alacked
its wrackful siege. But dawn’s novel idiom arose brilliant from
the harbor. Highballs kept, somehow, the thinnest rime. We
shuttered the hotel windows, plotted years of humid mornings,
scones crumbling in our sheets. What else, reader, could we
script on the Chevy’s rear glass? What would seem just still,
returning, as we must, to the year, what would thrill him, might
remind that even a slim crescent dazzles the black ink of night?
From Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham. Copyright © 2024 by Corey Van Landingham. Reprinted with the permission of Sarabande Books.