“Dear Anybody” is one of two uniquely romantic poems by Denise Jarrott in our Fall 2018 issue.

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I CAN FIND ANYTHING ABOUT YOU BEAUTIFUL, even the things that other lovers told
you were grotesque. You don’t even have to ask. It isn’t that
I am incapable of endurance. If anything, I can go for miles trailing that part of
you behind me, that part which cannot be contained.
I am here with
you at your window. The things it faces will appear as
I see them: the dirty sparrows, the iron fence with the grapevine motif, the mailbox
you painted to appear more friendly to the mail carriers listening to podcasts
                       or gossiping about who was cheating on whom. Woe to
your landlord who glued the sills shut, so that no one can hear me when
I scream. And how I’d scream, uncontained.

Dear Anybody,
I cannot say anything about me is pure, except how like bread dough my love for
you expands with each punch, each indentation, stupidly it fills itself in, to the shape.
I take my shape based on the container. I will love
you, Anybody, the same way I’ve loved everyone else, as if
I am rich in time, in patience, if only to exist with
you in the transparent blue window in which no one else exists. If only
I could prove to you how deep the water is through the glass bottom boat
you agreed to board with me, scraping along the latest reef. This is to say
I am about to capsize, and the red of this coral breaks my heart only to have it mend to
your specifications, a different shape.

Dear Anybody, this is to say that
you will break me in a very specific way, as all bodies do. Once,
I asked someone, in the space of a poem such as this one, to let me sleep in
your bed and feed me seeds and let me drink bitter tea, to tie up my hair so that
I can exist only as a body. Once, I gave a whole book to someone wholly different from
you but it is like handing them a snake that sits so still on the wrist.
I gave over my whole life like handing over a jar of buttons, expecting devotion.

Dear Anybody,
I can tell you this, if you let me, I will give
you the strange objects I have made of my life, but
I cannot tell you what to do with them.

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DENISE JARROTT is the author of NYMPH(Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) and a chapbook, Nine Elegies (dancing girl press). She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Brooklyn.