From My Window I Grow a Sky
Earth Swells
Edge
Life on the Sick Planet
The First Time You Ate a Persimmon

From My Window I Grow a Sky

I line up three tablespoons of peanut butter:

breakfast, lunch, dinner. 
The fourth, an after- 
            thought: desire 
            in the hollow
of the apartment.

Here is the fantasy of every 
                                                body
                                                I’ve never lived               
in placed softly 
on my tongue:
                                    I let the grit 

dissolve without chewing, 
stare into the trap of 
                                    a vast calendar 
                                    tacked on the wall, 

a blurred scribble of missed 
                                                lovers & meals,
             only hunger 
left to polish 
each spoon, 
                                     forgiving.

Earth Swells

I wake before most sunrises by accident, 
     the way that taut buds betray the bold 
entrance of the blossoms they hold closed. 
     The same way that you look at me sometimes, 

composing poems in languages your mouth 
     doesn’t know to speak yet, a volcanic 
rumble from the deepest part of the ocean, 
     appearing to us as gentle waves.

I do know this song. Let me tell you. My body 
     was a dormant but impending rupture before 
I knew you, and it remains that way, all of it, 
     graceless plates shifting under a mess of sinew 

and bone and fire and rock. It is November 
     and we are sweating inside the foliage, under 
the 4pm sunset and the tangled sheets, 
     soaked through with our best intentions. 

Lover, let me tell you, there is no easy fix 
     for ground forced open before its time—
you trace the fault lines that map my ribcage 
     with your tongue, this hot planet split open 

into new canyons, formations, storms, seas, 
     the moon pulling differently, breaking love 
open on an unfamiliar shore, this strange 
     inevitable tide that carries us to one another.

Edge

Last night you fed me 
     carefully, word by word, 
     my mouth a thick slit 
            of neon still burning 

in the slick of dusk,
     our bodies electric 
     against each other 
            like terrible defibrillators, 

a return to some kind of life
     we don’t recognize but
     somehow still entirely 
            ours—the river below us

while we fucked against 
     the window, our faces
     becoming water, becoming
            city, becoming sky.

Life on the Sick Planet

The city is suspended 
            in the blue ash-haze

of far-off wildfires. 
            Do you know of

a world where 
            I don’t wake 

in fear? Dusk 
            complicates us,

wheezing in through 
            uncertain windows.

The First Time You Ate a Persimmon

I won’t forget the wonder 
of your face, or the light in the room
as the sunset revealed itself to us 
in layers, lavender husks 

of clairvoyant clouds, blush of late-
fall fruit, the slick of persimmon 
on your lips, then night.

When I say I can’t get close 
enough to you, what I mean is

let me perch inside the cathedral 
of your ribs and sing for you 
in the wobbly octaves of 
my unlovely chirp. 

Can you hear the little song 
I am making for you? Can you 
hear it when you are falling

through the fingers of the sky, into 
the shadow of our eclipse?

Samantha Zighelboim is the author of The Fat Sonnets (Argos Books,
2018), and the co-translator of Equestrian Monuments by Luis Chaves
(After Hours Editions, 2022). She is a 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Poetry,
a recipient of a Face Out grant from CLMP, and the recipient of the 2016
John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation from The Poetry
Foundation. Her poems, translations and essays have appeared or are
forthcoming in POETRY, Boston Review, Lit Hub, The Guardian, PEN
Poetry Series, and Guernica, among others. Samantha lives in New York
City with her cats, Babette and Orca. She teaches creative writing at
Columbia University and Parsons School of Design at The New School.