Amy Lowell Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Sarah Audsley
Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023 and served as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024.
GOSSIP AND METAPHYSICS I load the dishwasher, thinking about how the body belongs to nature. How after your parents have died, you are scorched by the stars. Of what’s left, after the scattering. Noticing as well, that we are out of Finish Jet-Dry Rinse Aide. What we want, Akhmatova says, is gossip and metaphysics. After my stepfather’s funeral we went to see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Laughed our heads off. The jolt of being alive, the belly-splitting gift and lift of it. Then giddy, in the mall after the movie, balancing like a kid walking along the top of the raised wall protecting the plantings, asking my cousins what’s happened to so and so since high school, who else has died lately. It only seems to come to you, the gratitude, at times like that. Like that, after the lightning strike, the cancer, the car wreck. Sometimes I can see through the words on the page to the way the body can hold them. Other times the words stay flat. WAKE UP! I tell them. To help me get past what is cold and thin walled within me. Getting closer to hurrah the way the drive-in movie once made the world seem important, outsized. The best part was watching the sky tint pink and purple and roll out its carpet of stars, and the way the actors got so huge in the dark. And how we sat on beach chairs, the tinny speakers blaring like a chorus of frogs a quarter-croak apart, all of us a rapt and peaceful people for the next two hours. Haven’t you lived it, too, the plague, the losses, your wrecked and ancient childhood, each day’s frantic encampments and assessments, telling yourself in the grocery store it’s OK you left your list at home as you wonder whether loss increases love, was it ricotta or mozzarella you needed, and the Finish, you remembered, just now.