Julia Wehner: to feel, and to live

• Ghost
• my romances are packed
• in an empty box
• spaceless
• slid clean across cold tile
• making faces that
• mimic
• art

• tricked 
• into a large heart 
• only bricks and buds to house
• in this smoky dining room 
• with a couch
• and blushing knees
• to brush and
• press

• hungry still
• perhaps could ponder less
• but what past is there
• to see besides dinners i
• couldn’t eat
• no there is some old
• old word that billows
• both breathed and
• unheard ripping clean
• through centers of frozen
• wrists with a touch
• sublime

• Have I…

• (have i been
• a lover in my sleep 
• this whole time?)

• Longing’s Clothes
• Nothing that perfectly fits.
• A painter’s torn and billowed cuffs; a thin dress
• awarding no favors to figure, yet tinted an ideal green
• to sit seven inches, in a trailing drop, below
• the ripe heart of a bloomed eye.
• Cottons and linens spaced away from the skin, causing
• mere brushes in inhaling to collapse the notion that
• feeling every large thing at one time is unreasonable, or
• remotely under our control.

• It’s all in the clothing longing wears.

• And it’s what I wear on these evenings.
• I quietly reboil the same cup of tea. I wait
• for my brain to grasp some new way
• to talk about it. I loathe everything I see
• that he has never touched. Fumes of longing,
• scatterings of ribbons — nothing that perfectly fits.

• I sit — motionless — by the open window.
• Faint gusts funnel through my loose sleeves, and
• my breath pushes my arms to meet
• the thread. Behind blue lids, I watch you
• wash the dinner dishes, cradling them in
• the warmth of a frothing sink.
• I unravel.

Julia Wehner has been writing poems since her first poetry unit in the third grade (the birthplace of such works as “If Only I Could Marry Food”). Her largest dreams for the future include composing piano music, educating her future children in the art of noticing, and cooking every meal with home-grown fresh herbs. She hopes to tell honest stories through everything she writes, innovating commonly-felt human emotions in an attempt to catch readers off guard: to remind them how richly good it is to feel, and to live.