Here I am again, unable to write a poem without putting you at the center. Unable to write
anything without the feeling of water around me. Without the rotting leaf and fermenting apple,
the backroads leading nowhere and dust kicked up from forgotten farm fields. I cannot write
this poem without the clay I gathered from the creek bed as a child, without the sugar maples
we tapped for syrup or the dark blue truck that became, for a few short weeks each year,
the Sap Ship carrying us to the next tree. Here, the pawpaw, the raspberries picked into used
yogurt containers and blueberries eaten straight from the bush. Here too, the asparagus stands
at the end of every driveway, the air smelling always of manure and dirt. Here, the public library
open two days a week for a total of ten hours, the used bookstore I would lose myself in
every day of summer. Here, summer days so hot everyone decides to skip work and go
swimming instead. Here, the nude beach where the queers can be found every day of summer
regardless of work. Here, skinny-dipping in February and ice frozen in my hair. Here, the hills
I biked down at 6:00 am singing at the tops of my lungs. Hear the river, where I first learned
my love of water. Here, the woodstove where I wrote my first poem. Here, the ball field, where,
under a full moon, because this is a poem and the moon has to have been full, I kissed a man
for the first time and did not call myself unclean. Here, the lake I have come to after every
heartbreak, the woods where I first saw my father cry. Here, my love, who calls me to say,
drop whatever you’re doing and go look at the moon, and who, has, somehow, put up with me
writing love poems since the very first date and reading to them for hours on end. Here garlic
cloves crushed and eaten whenever someone has a cold. Here, the stinging nettles my mother
and I harvested each spring for pesto and tea, the taste of pre-dawn coffee and the way morning
lifts itself, like a shawl from the mountains. And I cannot end this poem without the squelch
of mud between my toes, without the stink of skunk cabbage, fluff from the milkweed pods
or the root-beer-taste of black birch between teeth. I cannot end this poem without the smell
of woodsmoke in my hair, without the cattails and dogbane, hemlocks and oak. I cannot end this
poem without running into someone I know in the grocery store and stopping to talk for fifteen
minutes no matter how much of a rush I am in. I cannot end this poem without the graveyard
where I first laid my virginity to rest, or the singers who have gathered on the town common
for an hour every day since March of 2020 to remember, together, how to sing the soul back to
the body. And I cannot end this poem with the garden of my body only now bursting into bloom.
And I will not end this poem
—
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, and elsewhere. They are a former Brooklyn Poets Fellow and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.
