Carly Joy Miller

Epistle on Desire

Men in the air. Long days long days. My retainer’s tang bookends them.

Sweat and showers turpentine the last kiss.

To remain sweet: Apples and walnuts for breakfast. Vanilla ice cream, coax for sleep.

To be pined over. Pinned. Repetition, a stigmata:

I tried, then tired, of the larger body.

Yet, servant to trembling, I—

a penance in the country of ardor.

To ardor in the country of labor,

to serve the larger body: all

pins and pines toward—

a ridicule of fingers, little blood blossoms.

What slants me is an honest conversation, a sharpness before a storm.

Brown buildings against sky. In every room, you.

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Carly Joy Miller is the author of Ceremonial (Orison Books, 2018), selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2017 Orison Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Like a Beast (Anhinga Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem a Day, The Laurel Review, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A digital content writer and editor, Carly also teaches in The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.