I’m trying to remember how to make your favorite soup
when I have only candles and soap and it’s raining
hard enough to feel we are living underwater
or at least behind a waterfall. Could I use my own skin?
Tears are warm and salty, but I don’t want to cry
just to make your soup; that seems faintly histrionic
or at least sentimental. The best soup’s made with bones,
of course, and I haven’t any fresh ones, at least not outside
my body. And so I think of many things
I don’t feel anymore, and of you trudging
home now in this historic rain, maybe even humming
one of our favorite songs under your breath,
thinking of my soup as you take a wrong turn
in the deluge, almost tasting that soup now as you wade
the sidewalk-rapids on a street in some neighborhood
that looks a lot like ours, though it isn’t. I am boiling
clear water now, just to find you.

—From the poet’s newest book, The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press); republished here by author’s permission

Michael Hettich’s

work appears widely in journals and anthologies. He is the author of 19 poetry books and chapbooks, including: The Frozen Harbor, winner of the 2016 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017); Systems of Vanishing, winner of the 2013 Tampa Review Prize (University of Tampa Press, 2014); The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers Press, 2011); and Like Happiness (Anhinga Press, 2010).

Author’s website: michaelhettich.com