Sapphic

Abstract

Sapphic Heather Treseler (bio) All night, the heat pipes clankedand chortled, whined and groanedlike two cantankerous old loverspracticed in the habit of each other’spleasure. All night, I wandered lonelyas the sheep of unsleep, a badgerof worry, a skunk of longing, allhungry nose and restless tail. Shadows clung to the furred darkscarved around my shoulders,tucked behind my narrow knees:all of me postured around yourabsence like the archaic statuetilled from a Tuscan hillsideby a farmer’s plow that clockedits dirt-rouged marble brow. From manure and loam to finemuseums, on loan: even iconsmust make a little money, earntheir keep in our esteem. I studya trio of Orantes from an ancienttomb: three women with theirarms outstretched around a lostobject, negative space giving their tilted hips, listing breasts,and nearsighted looks definition.No wonder, last night, I couldn’tfind my glasses. Better to gazeat corroded figures than study [End Page 186] the unremarkable ruin of one’sbody, etched with orbits aroundthe sun, an almost uniform no one. So lack gives to the lyre, draws gutturallonging into language. I sit, mullingphrases, like a young keening childlearning syllables’ lock-and-keyspecificity, earning the gentlingtouch, warm scent, and familiarvoice of another—or the eyeof the night’s moon-mother. [End Page 187] Heather Treseler heather treseler’s Parturition (2020) won the Munster Literature Centre’s international poetry chapbook prize. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Harvard Review, PN Review, and The Irish Times; her essays appear in larb, Boston Review, and eight books of criticism. She is professor of English at Worcester State University. Copyright © 2022 Heather Treseler