Finding My Dead Friend’s Poetry in Fire Under Her Tongue
(In memory of Susan Elbe, 1946-2017)
I’m leafing through this anthology of women poets,
hoping their words might strike sparks against
mine, when there’s your name and two poems
I don’t remember. In one, hard seasons keep returning,
the way they always did for you. The other mentions
the oil stove’s isinglass—a word I taught you—
that translucent window that lets light in or out,
and your search for what shimmers in the gray of winter.
There were years when we spoke by phone almost daily,
our lives unfolding in conversations that lit
our girlhood darkness, both our mothers dead too young.
You still smoked then and I’d hear you inhale,
imagining the cigarette’s flare illuminating the curves
and angles of your face. Once, you told me that many
nights you still cried yourself to sleep, the ferocity
you wore like a wolf’s fur concealing the tenderness
underneath. We were motherless daughters together,
girls in a dark wood who’d raised ourselves alone
then found each other in poems. We held hands
those years, stumbling over roots, grief a black
button balanced on our tongues, our words flickering
stitches, candles lighting the way. Even when we fell out
over something that now seems pointless, we kept talking
about poetry and how it’s a process you called
mining a life, a trail opening a way back
and forward into who we really are. Where are you
now, brilliant, stubborn friend I failed to love well
enough, forgetting the wolf-self wasn’t all you were?
After you died, you visited me in autumn, no winter
in your hair or eyes. You told me you lived in a more
beautiful country than any you’d ever imagined,
your spirit risen from the ashes they buried
with your mother’s bones, opening the grave
that you might lie close to her again—the isinglass
window in the oil stove filled with shimmer
as the flames leapt high, the hard seasons over.
The Chute
(For my sister)
When I saw the two girls sledding
down the hill in their bright jackets—
one fuchsia, one rose, like flowers in winter—
the smaller girl lying prone atop her big
sister’s back, arms locked around her shoulders,
face buried in her neck, holding on tightly,
trusting her to steer, both of them shrieking
at the top of their lungs, as the Flexible Flyer
plunged down the icy chute, I thought of you, Jenny.
And how we lay in your big bed the week
after your husband died as we had not done
since we were girls, tucked in together
at our grandmother’s house the summer
our mother began dying, our braids still damp
from the bath. I slept in his spot because
you asked me to, the space where he’d lain
beside you too big to face alone. All night
I lay, half awake, watching while you sank
beneath navy blue blankets of grief and exhaustion.
I stroked your work-roughened nurse’s hand,
pulled the covers up over your shoulder
when they slipped, or held you in my arms
when you woke, stiff as a wooden doll,
forgetting what had happened, then
remembering, the way the grieving do.
All night I kept my fingers clenched
on the sled’s shimmying cross-bar, afraid
to hold on, afraid of letting go, filled
with the sensation of falling, time
arrrowing through me, as we hurtled down
the harrowed, heart-wrecked hill
of your loss, the cats and the dog sleeping
beside us, your boy in the next room,
and nowhere to put this tenderness,
no words to ever make it right again,
nothing but our own lives’ imperfect
paradise to offer, this poor substitute,
this keening, left- handed love, sharp
as the sled’s runners slicing
our path down through the snow.
Alison Townsend is the author of a memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (shortlisted for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay); two books of poetry, Persephone in America and The Blue Dress; and a short prose volume, The Persistence of Rivers. Her third poetry collection, American Lonely, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in 2026. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in numerous journals, including About Place, Blackbird, Catamaran, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Awards include the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize, as well as residencies at Hedgebrook, VCCA, and other colonies. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives on four acres of prairie and oak savanna outside Madison.