In Order by Holly Day

The letters come in the mail and each one of them
is a detailed summary of the things you like to do to your new wife
organized coldly like a shopping list or a book report.
For some reason, I read each and every one of these letters
as though we’re still married, as if out of some marital duty
as if these are the sorts of correspondences that pass between
every other broken couple. I wonder how long

you’ll write me these letters, these summaries, if they’ll include
mention of your wife’s round, pregnant body, details of the birth
stories about babies tumbling around your living room, first steps
what it’s like to sleep with the same woman again and again
why and when and how you think about me in comparison.
Will they stretch on into the later years

when the children have grown up, grown out of the house
expand to include details of hip replacement surgeries,
therapeutic exercise groups, the aches and pains that come with age
what it’s like to feel your wife’s body, late at night,
when her skin’s gone crêpey, her bones suddenly hard and obvious
through the soft retreat of muscle? And what will you tell me about you
will you write to me as though you’re still some angry 20-year-old
reporting on everything withering to an end around you,
or will there be a man behind that pen that I don’t know at all
wouldn’t recognize if I passed him on the street
some stranger that barely remembers
why he started writing to me at all?



Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).