Michelle Bitting

Summer 2023 | Poetry

Nocturne Sonnet

I can see you through the kitchen’s steamed up

window but you can’t see me here in the dark,

not my moon-sheened arms like Victorian candles

sparking when rats rustle the bushes, not the crickets

weaving ghost crowns about my head watching you

plunge your fists into a sink’s rust dome, erasing

dregs, the headless crusts of fish, Brussels sprout

flecks & basil dip that studded each plate until you

made them shine again. When smoothed & patted

planets align like children in their KitchenAid rack,

the gloss of life cracks and dies even in its greening, even

as days tower gold and long and I hear old winter's song,

the went away of reddening hours, the stay of love, but most

of all, my darling, most of all, when autumn leaves start to fall.

 

Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of Arizona Global.

Michelle recommends Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads and Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman. As well as Broker, written & directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda, and starring Song Kang-ho.

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