Echo

You don’t know the part of the story
where he left his reflection and came with me.

I had to promise to tell him
how small he was, the smallest

I’d ever taken, how I wanted every other man
more than I wanted him, how I was wanting them

as I fucked him. It hurt my stomach,
though I did it until the end.

I would check my face
in any mirror I passed—

how much of me had scattered?
I never thought I’d leave

until I realized it was okay
if he only remembered me as a weight.

Though we don’t use the word mourn
as much as we used to, I remember and do so carefully.

His coffee-stained teeth, his shadowed spine,
his voice calling, What about me? What about? What?

Jessica E. Pierce‘s debut collection, Consider the Body, Winged, was published by First Matter Press. You can find her poems in Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Euphony, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize, Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize, and the MVICW Poetry Contest for which she received a Poet Fellowship.

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, WA. She’s the author of six books of poetry, including Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award, and her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work has been published in journals like The American Poetry Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.