Mag Gabbert

Lake

after Solmaz Sharif

You can’t cum from behind me anymore
because, once, I said it hurt.

A plane floats outside the window,
like a fish in dark water.

I only remember how to make two things
out of paper: stars and boats.

Every morning by the time we wake up, 
the day’s already broken. 

When my grandmother had run out
of language, I folded

a handful of stars as a gift for her, and she
just swallowed them.

Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, forthcoming in 2023), winner of the 2021 The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry, which includes the works published here. Her poems can also be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Paris Review Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from Texas Tech University and an MFA from The University of California at Riverside; she’s received poetry fellowships from Idyllwild Arts and Poetry at Round Top; and, in 2021, she was awarded a 92Y Discovery Award. Mag teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as the interviews editor for Underblong Journal.