Beth Anstandig
Identicals
The mammal brain tracks and records patterns in order to survive and move through the world with the most efficiency. I’ve always been interested in the most primitive parts of the human experience and how this pattern seeking part of the mammal experience is alive and well for humans. This poem exists in a liminal space, between waking and dreaming, where our minds move in and out of consciousness, from impressionistic patterns to more exacting and precise ones. So much emotion and truth can happen in that space. It’s almost as if wisdom sneaks through the hours of dawn when our eyes first open.
The night was strung together
like paper cutouts, those faceless identicals,
body after body after body joined
where hands would be but are not.
In this morning light, my eyes gather multiplicities—
glasses of bedside water, two lamps,
grandfather slippers on the floor.
French doors widening to the rain,
dogs asleep near the blowing curtains.
In your dream, there were three of you in a speeding car—
you driving you, you angry at you,
you slapping you
in the back of the head.
I’m not sure which one to hold.
You’re not sure
which one to wake to—
and which one to forget.
Words are spoken—
good morning
my love
marry me—
We lean our bodies into one another.
We look for the warmth of two.
But there are only these paper-thin replicas of us
fluttering in the morning wind,
their edges, inexact and unsettling.
This is how it begins.
Beth Anstandig holds an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Caesura, Clackamas Literary Review, Flint Hills Review, Yale Anglers’ Journal, Louisiana Literature, Phoenix New Times, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, Big Muddy, BODY, and El Portal, among others. She is the author of The Garden of Forking Paths (Prentice Hall/Pearson) and The Human Herd: Awakening Our Natural Leadership (Morgan James Publishing). She has received a Pushcart Prize Nomination, Willamette Award in Poetry, The Clackamas Literary Review Poetry Prize, The Atlanta Review International Merit Award in Poetry, and three-time finalist standing for her first poetry collection.
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