Emma DePanise

Under Artificial Light

For a second the shadow        watered

a stain on the paper. You gave me    these words

 
so I must’ve nudged them      yellow, to ripple

or wrinkle. I slid         the paper and watched the stain grow

 
or shrivel, watched each word        I held close almost

soak. Heavier now, your eyes        and your fingers.

While I Usually Recycle, Tomorrow’s Trash Day and in 2-6 Weeks These Words May Reach

I can’t write about the dead        without writing

you. I can’t write you        without writing dust, hole

in the ground, absence.        Dust: skin

of your thumb thumbing        the paper, your voice

in a glass jar. Hole:                white space wanting

the words I won’t        write. Absence:        this crumple

imagining                pressure, your thumb

and your forefinger,        not at all dusty, warm.

Emma DePanise’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as River Styx, The Minnesota Review, Reed Magazine, The National Poetry Review, Passages Northand elsewhere. She is the 2020 winner of the Blue Earth Review Summer Contest in Poetry, a 2019 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award and the 2018 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in poetry and teaching assistant at Purdue University, a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. One of her favorite sweets (there are many) is dark chocolate.