Erica Miriam Fabri

First Love

I return most often to that one boiling night,
when we said goodbye through the screen door.
Our sixteen year-old noses rubbed against the place
where flies crawl, where insects grip wire mesh, looking for
light, warmth, a way inside, or just a place to take a rest
before their next flight. The scene comes back to me like an echo:
you step away, look back, a gray filter shading your clock-face.
What if I had called you back? What if I ripped the screen
with my teeth like an animal? What could I have changed?
Does some of the rubber behind your eye sockets melt away?
Do your lungs grow fists? Let’s say I swallow, every last drop,
of every last thing, that I siphon out of you; then what?
Do I make you brand new? The morning you died,
I hadn't slept. My infant son had spent all the dark hours
crawling on me, begging for more of me. My father called,
and when I heard his voice, I felt a tornado of rocks rising
from my middle, then I just kept saying no. No, no, no.
No, no, no. Oh no. No.

Two Kinds of Cake

After I came home from your funeral,
I baked forty-eight cupcakes
for my son's first birthday. The recipe
was strange; the ingredients
didn't blend together smoothly:
a heaping cup of grief, folded into
freshly melted sweet joy; a ceremony
for death, mixed in the same bowl
as a revelry of birth; the hard knowing
that you will never grow older,
topped with a celebration of days
because my baby boy has.

There is no order here.
No reservations were made
to schedule when the soft parts
of me would be pulled in one direction
or another. If my Love is a kite,
two different winds are flying me
to two far-reaching parts
of the same sky.

How Shadows are Made

I love you, but a whale of a shadow escorts you
to every door. You can’t crawl out from inside
the shadow's shell for long enough to dig up
the dirt. I want to help you find enough yellow
to dismantle the shadow, but there are strong
storms on the sun's surface. I want you slapped
up against me, but your shadow is as unnerving
as swimming with sharks, and I have been trying
to find something in this world that feels better
than making love to you, but, instead, I am eating
rattlesnake after rattlesnake. My want is an army,
greedy as the want men have for power. But I do not
do what men do when they want. I do not tear limbs
off bodies to win land, but I do pull petals off ox-eyes,
one by one, as I ask the golden circle to tell me
if you can see me, my love, when you are submerged
in shadow; can you see me, here, in the dark place?

Bees

Last night, in bed, I was attacked by bees
and you slept through the whole thing.
They didn’t want a single bite of you.
I can’t imagine why not.
In the morning, you woke up
and examined my legs.
They were covered with stings
shaped like tiny onions.
It could have been a lot worse,
you said. And that was true.
Almost always is. You leaned down,
to kiss my ankle, and I asked
if you were going to try to suck
the venom out. No, you said,
the poison could ruin my teeth.
Besides, it would make more sense
for me to suck out the sweet.

Hands

What if our hands came first?
What if they were the first thing
that grew on us, and then,
we used them to build
all the other parts? What if
we were allowed to mold
ourselves, with our own fingers,
into exactly what we wanted
to be? What if we could
tell the world: I made myself.
There is no one else to blame
but me.

Erica Miriam Fabri's first book, Dialect of a Skirt, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation. Her second book, Morphology, (forthcoming 2025) was the winner of the Write Bloody Publishing Jack McCarthy book award. She teaches writing at Pace University and at the College of Staten Island for the City University of New York (CUNY). ericafabri.com.