Annie Stenzel
Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published earlier this year by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared U.S. and U.K. journals including Atlas and Alice, Chestnut Review, Galway Review, Kestrel, Night Heron Barks, On the Seawall, Rust + Moth, Saranac Review, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, The Lake, and UCity Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.
Lost
—after Linda Pastan
It depends on the day, what the poems
do—the ones not written because
work because kids because arthritis.
It depends whether what happened
is that they got lost in swirls of mist or stumbled
too close to the boiling cauldron.
It depends on what they needed to do…were they
singers or stompers or just trying to whisper
I love you through the galaxy to their alien counterpart
whose title is not “poet” but Ov(&*SxG#, a word
that means more to the alien than “poet’
means to most humans who walk this weird planet.
But the trouble is, every once in a while,
a poem not written prompts
a faraway star that is Sol to six planets
to turn supernova, dooming those spheres, some of them
fertile and sweet, some of them home only to sand
that whirls into consummate clouds, signifying the end
times for song, for spring, for any modicum of joy.
And after that we’re probably in trouble, because, well—
Nobody knows what happens after that.
From my life-list of close encounters with non-human beings
(after Tony Hoagland’s “Field Guide”)
Once, during a time that was assuredly one of the hardest
of my lengthy life, it turned out I was, for some odd
reason, unusually attractive to butterflies: again and again
a butterfly chose some part of me to land on—once my right arm
another time a shin. Mostly it would just linger
for a second or two, but on occasion it might set up shop
for a short time to do what I think of as butterfly pushups:
standing still on those strange, slender, jointed legs, then
opening their wings wide as though to demonstrate exactly
how beautiful they were. Open. Close. Then open again.
One time this happened in Paris while I was
walking in the Jardin des Plantes with my brother Julius
and the very instant the creature chose my
cheek to rest on, my brother looked at me as though
I had suddenly become a princess, or even the Buddha.
Have I told you enough? I want you to see,
if you can, why I hope never to forget that moment,
even though, chances are, nothing of that nature
is ever going to happen again.
