Elizabeth SYlvia

My Other Life

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

Dear Elizabeth,

My body offers some companion as a rock in the bay
tiderises to foot the black cormorant. Saltwater preys
on metal and memory. You talked on strength
watching planks bent in the steam box,
would only go wharfway among strangers,
only have a society with the lonesome shouldered sea bag.

Some birds so natural to distance they fly sleeping. From this moving
we both seek a salt pen for the frozen sand, something more lasting than
the early letters our feet stamped ahead of these moonwaters.

And yet I don’t weigh the lie of a thought lost against any life
the ocean has taken. My tiny joys and sorrows scrapheaped on the page
beside yours year later. Confined in the upstairs griefroom,
corner windowed to the sea’s indifference, bat away my hand
writing through volumes to mirror you. Say time makes no twins of us.

Know the first survives endangered in subsequent imagining.
I go on picturing your century, severe master,
will make rhythm from your straits for my shanty,
denying our spirals run contrary through the periscope’s thick glass
which cannot kaleidoscope, only water and wave each of us
at our wrong ends. Do you recognize
the tether knocking you dockside as also my own. Do I only wish it.

This poem is from a series of “derasures,” an invented form written around an original erasure of and incorporating language from letters of the 19th century poet Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, who was raised in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Much of Stoddard’s writing reflects her frustrations with her hometown’s restrictive social norms and the circumscription of women’s lives. This derasure draws from Stoddard’s letter to Margaret Sweat, March 20th, 1854, published in The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, ed. Jennifer Putzi, U. Iowa Press, 2012.

Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and teacher from Massachusetts whose first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan, and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. Sylvia has been a presenter for the Mass Poetry Festival and received fellowships from the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize. Visit her site at elizabethsylviapoet.net.