Preliminary Notes on the Tactile Portrait of Two People

By: Austin Reece

compare her heart to a well

& his to brackish water

sink down

the well

like a stone

touch the sides

of this wet cell

let the rot

make contact

*

he was never hard as rock she

was never smooth as glass

he was calloused fingers

and cold hands she

was smoke

swelling from a cigarette

*

like braille on a broken heart he tried

to decipher the signs

of her disappointment…

but love is blind

*

the materials—

water in a jar

from the river where she drowned

hair from her brush, of course

5 of his pill bottles

& 5 of his poems

polaroid of her playing

with the baby

on the floor

*

the epigraph

after all there are some who get paid

for touching

*

in certain circumstances two people

in different times or places

can touch each other

though they don’t leave each other intact

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Austin Reece is a teacher and writer living in Southeastern Wisconsin with his wife and daughter in a house made of cream city bricks. His poems and essays have appeared in books and magazines, most recently in ITERANT (https://iterant.org/issue11/austin-reece/), and his unpublished chapbook, The Wake of Dreams, was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize for 2024.