Elegy Four

after Clementine Von Radics

By Julia Glazebnik

The woman across the street once told us she liked a story

to be sad. I like it better this way: Summer, 

small talk. The triangles of streetlight. How I watched

your hands, their never shaking, 

undo the knots in mine. Everything would have been dark

if not for your neck, pale 

in the fluorescence. Everything was still 

true then. All motionless, your body, 

mine. That day I’d watched my father take a baseball bat

to a nest of wasps on our front porch. 

The way they swallowed his legs 

I thought he might never be mistaken for pure again. His hands

broken with connotation. 

Then, summer. Your mattress, lame 

on the hardwood floor. You liked to leave 

the windows open. I liked to read elegies to the bathroom mirror.

The way the darkness would turn you 

into the only thing I knew. The way you’d shrug 

unprompted. I said I am worried 

I will spend my entire life on this sidewalk and meant

trying not to need you. Even then I knew 

there were things I would not be allowed. The way I said worried 

as if I wasn’t certain. Even then, your hands, 

impossible and still.