On Missing

by Melissa Watt

I could play the guitar
just barely and I would try
when we’d arrive home

all liquor dilated, hearts
more capable of loving.
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing

that lights me up like this
once did. The magic in my life
is quieter now, but grace,

once parsimonious, now crackles
through my circuits: microscopic
wildflowers in my rushing blood.

I hear it in the right side of early mornings
the bright side, long past my vice
slide to the bottom of the sea.

Call this “Forgiveness,” “my thirties,” “God.”
What was it that held me there
and now has let me go?

So little happens on a given day
but I feel lucky, standing solid gold
outside the event horizon.

Melissa Watt holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have been featured in The Breakwater Review, Ohio Edit, and elsewhere. If she’s not writing, she’s probably singing karaoke with a live band or catching spiders and taking them outside as a favor to her loved ones.

Word from the Editor

Our stories can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell. In her essay “Alone in Company,” Chelsea Bayouth reflects on the role of an artist at the end of 2018: “For me, it is to fear that every word or image is a window into public, political, and social tumult. It means you have to be more vulnerable than you or anyone in times previous has ever been.” If we continue to write, to paint, to dance, to show up for ourselves and our art every day, we might find that our work transcends ambiguity and discomfort to reveal a greater insight into ourselves, and if we are lucky, into the world.

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