Kevin
By
Sara Eddy
... for Kevin Kanarek, 1963-2024
1. What You Need (2022)
It’s not my place but I’ll tell you what you need.
My place is in this cafe writing poems alone
and what you need is to sit and read poems
alone. Not together. But not totally apart.
My place is a buggy hole in a rotten log, the snuffly
kisses of a fox. Yours is chaos-corridors in the city,
motley, discordant, thrilling. We all choose
our different mice, and live with the consequences.
There’s delight in every pretzel. I’m thriving.
Can you believe a poet who says she’s thriving?
Are you thriving? Life spiders out for you.
Early mornings, late nights, worry. What you need
is the peppery taste of nasturtiums and good decisions,
the mesmerizing red of Vermont maples,
and some strong enduring meds for anxiety,
entropy, cataclysm, the end of the world.
2. Relic (2023)
It was a small thing,
a parking-lot pebble
you picked up
while I put on my boots.
We examined it together,
heads almost touching,
our living breath one thing,
a complicated intimacy.
A black round stone,
a single white line dividing.
I turned it over in your palm–
my fingertips, your palm.
On the other side the line troubled
the surface, sketching
a slanted death’s head
like Holbein's Ambassadors,
a skull concealed in plain sight.
Here, you said, handing it to me.
Something to remember me by.
3. Our Last Dinner (2024)
You sent your food back.
Too sweet, you said,
and when replaced,
it tasted like nothing.
Like nothing is what you said
shaking your head, and I saw
how gone you were.
I tried our usual subjects
rolling them out like temptations
on a dessert cart, but you
no longer saw the point,
could barely even say
nothing
4. In the Bardo (2025)
I had been thinking about the dead,
how their voices clatter
and we can’t stop looking for them,
feeling them settle on our beds.
But then you died.
A small stone.
Backseat fumblings.
Laying floor in haste.
Your lips at my ear–I say
How goes it in the Bardo?
Is it as you expected–
are you found wanting,
shuttled off to a lesser life?
No matter.
All you have to do
is sit cross-legged on the floor
listen to your own stopped breath
and wait while systems
rise and float away.
Listen: trees are singing
corn husks rustling
echoes saved in a storage unit.
You know how this goes.
5. Dumplings (2025)
Too late I realize the last time
I was in this mom and pop
Chinese restaurant with its fluorescent
lights and fish-tank googoo eyes
was with you, before you gathered
up the tangles of your dear self
and left this miserable earth,
and now I'm sitting exactly
in the space once occupied
by your body, and I am unable
to hear my friend's questions
for trying to reconfigure time
and discover you here, back
again, alive and eating dumplings.
6. The Tower (2025)
I pull cards for you
but it's all future unknown
and mysteries abound.
All I know is death asked
and you answered too quickly.
You used to scissor the cuffs
from old socks and wear
them on your pale wrists
in frigid upstate winters.
Your mind such a jumble.
I found one of those cuffs
tucked up in my drawer this morning.
Slipped it over my hand.
I know you would mean it
to be a kind of comfort.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
By
Sara Eddy
... for Kevin Kanarek, 1963-2024
1. What You Need (2022)
It’s not my place but I’ll tell you what you need.
My place is in this cafe writing poems alone
and what you need is to sit and read poems
alone. Not together. But not totally apart.
My place is a buggy hole in a rotten log, the snuffly
kisses of a fox. Yours is chaos-corridors in the city,
motley, discordant, thrilling. We all choose
our different mice, and live with the consequences.
There’s delight in every pretzel. I’m thriving.
Can you believe a poet who says she’s thriving?
Are you thriving? Life spiders out for you.
Early mornings, late nights, worry. What you need
is the peppery taste of nasturtiums and good decisions,
the mesmerizing red of Vermont maples,
and some strong enduring meds for anxiety,
entropy, cataclysm, the end of the world.
2. Relic (2023)
It was a small thing,
a parking-lot pebble
you picked up
while I put on my boots.
We examined it together,
heads almost touching,
our living breath one thing,
a complicated intimacy.
A black round stone,
a single white line dividing.
I turned it over in your palm–
my fingertips, your palm.
On the other side the line troubled
the surface, sketching
a slanted death’s head
like Holbein's Ambassadors,
a skull concealed in plain sight.
Here, you said, handing it to me.
Something to remember me by.
3. Our Last Dinner (2024)
You sent your food back.
Too sweet, you said,
and when replaced,
it tasted like nothing.
Like nothing is what you said
shaking your head, and I saw
how gone you were.
I tried our usual subjects
rolling them out like temptations
on a dessert cart, but you
no longer saw the point,
could barely even say
nothing
4. In the Bardo (2025)
I had been thinking about the dead,
how their voices clatter
and we can’t stop looking for them,
feeling them settle on our beds.
But then you died.
A small stone.
Backseat fumblings.
Laying floor in haste.
Your lips at my ear–I say
How goes it in the Bardo?
Is it as you expected–
are you found wanting,
shuttled off to a lesser life?
No matter.
All you have to do
is sit cross-legged on the floor
listen to your own stopped breath
and wait while systems
rise and float away.
Listen: trees are singing
corn husks rustling
echoes saved in a storage unit.
You know how this goes.
5. Dumplings (2025)
Too late I realize the last time
I was in this mom and pop
Chinese restaurant with its fluorescent
lights and fish-tank googoo eyes
was with you, before you gathered
up the tangles of your dear self
and left this miserable earth,
and now I'm sitting exactly
in the space once occupied
by your body, and I am unable
to hear my friend's questions
for trying to reconfigure time
and discover you here, back
again, alive and eating dumplings.
6. The Tower (2025)
I pull cards for you
but it's all future unknown
and mysteries abound.
All I know is death asked
and you answered too quickly.
You used to scissor the cuffs
from old socks and wear
them on your pale wrists
in frigid upstate winters.
Your mind such a jumble.
I found one of those cuffs
tucked up in my drawer this morning.
Slipped it over my hand.
I know you would mean it
to be a kind of comfort.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
