Do you still receive letters from the dead? I’m writing you

in the year after your death—without eyes, what do you see?

Here, the blue bean shrub and glimmerweed grow, later

revealing themselves, which sentences would have been

important. Do you still write letters, I’m writing to myself

the year I was born, a painted scroll unfurled

in a parking lot, the calligraphy of tires. Have you gotten

older, does the passing subway car see you, does the maple

tree hold you in between? Promise me you’ll stay awake, promise

me a speech for the soul in an arrangement of

white hawthorn and juniper. Promise me you’ll wake.

Promise me never to leave you.

—Marie T. Martin (1982-2021)

(Translated, from the German, by Kathleen Heil.)

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