Ghazal w/ Tequila
It’s past noon, but not yet five: too soon for tequila?
Cicadas and the dozing dog. Just one teaspoon of tequila.
A little nip on this sundrenched day while I wait
for love, for what I might become, for the moon. O tequila.
I could become lush to match the lush outside
each window. I’m not immune; pour me some tequila.
Lusher and lusher, lustrous. I could become a saint,
a garden, gardenia, mother, whore. I’m a loon for tequila.
The room develops a pulse. I’m smudged, delighted. And you!
Too bright to look at with my eyes open. I swoon into tequila.
It rivers through my veins, hangs a gone fishing sign on my mind.
My feet are a hundred nightcrawlers. My heart monsoons with tequila.
And where is my mouth, and where, my hand? The room
is smaller, louder, warmer. I deliquesce, cocooned here with tequila.
Will our thirst ever cease, Zoë? Come fall, will we be quenched?
Only time knows, I guess. For now, let’s commune with our tequila.
* * * * *
Ghazal w/ Road
I’ve left home. I’m in a bus, above its wheels, on a road,
beneath a sky, near a window. My breath unreels along this road.
The bus is the still thing and the world pulls past. I want
to be the peach stone, the open jar. My heart unseals, above this road.
I want to be the flesh around the stone, the thing consumed
at the kitchen sink, the juice down your arm, the peel, a ribbon of road.
To be the bus come to rest in its bay; to be the bay: that oily harbor.
To disrobe the fruit. Right here. To touch what’s becoming: to feel the road.
But I’m none of these, not really, just a woman on a bus on a road.
I haven’t even thought to think where I’m headed in this steel vessel on this road.
Did I tell you about the young fox I saw? Did I ask about the goldfinches?
They’re everywhere, this July; they fling themselves alongside, reveal the road.
Did I tell you how many words I’ve come up with for “ache”?
I call it everything: bullfrog and robin, eyelet, square meal, dirt road.
Did I tell you what words I’ve found for you, Nicole? I started, I guess.
I guess I’m not done. I see your light on. Sit still, I’ll steal across the road.
* * * * *
Ghazal w/ Salt
The F-train platform was thick with moss, hung with birds, dense with salt
the humans dripped. The heat hummed. Train apparatus on track apparatus on salt.
No, it was thick with moms, and we did drip. God, we were so milky.
So drippy. So full of birthday cakes, and detangling solutions, and so much salt.
In the great green room we cradled our hatchlings, each other’s. We were green
and flexible, we were good and kind, we wicked up what spilled, cranked salt.
It was its own sort of youthfulness — us as young mothers — a sort of hope,
the glow of those who lose sleep for love, who choose sugar over salt.
Sleep-deprived, we shone at the flower stand, the ice shop, the ATM,
we trundled our rolling flotilla to the playground, didn’t notice our rings of salt.
Ella says her body is my body since she spent so long inside of me.
She says, Lick my elbow. Loin of my loin, heart of my heart, salt of my salt.
Ray says that when I am an old woman he will carry my bones upstairs to bed.
A dozen years ago, we took the F to Coney Island, dipped our girls in salt.
How much for another spin on the Wonder Wheel, Zoë? Can we do it all again?
I miss the sky from there, the milky breath and lullabies, the air, its salt.
* * * * *
Ghazal w/ Bowl
The fish I caught I placed with clean water in a bowl.
Neither I nor the fish was new to the notion of a bowl.
The fish reminded me of something, but what?! I kept and watched her.
As she circled the ragged plastic tree, so I circled her bowl.
Mother was cocooned on the couch, lulled by her daytime stories.
Her nighttime cocktails. The cockatoo. And me with my cereal bowl.
I assumed the shape of a hummingbird, once, and once a cat,
a motor vehicle. I assumed the shape of water: an exact fit in any bowl.
Twice a thrush; three times a stone. And one strange night,
I became nothing for I could no longer bear the grief-shaped bowl.
But the room became the bowl; then bowl of sky and bowl of sea,
every body held by a larger body’s grief: a concentric set of bowls.
Thus, my circling, my being circled, my inner circling, my circus
of circles, my circulatory malaise, my circuitous soul: my bowl.
And thus are we held and thus do we hold, Nicole. The well,
the wish, the glass, the fish, the spoon, the dish, the bowl.
* * * * *
Ghazal w/ Sleep
With one eye open, I have lain myself down to sleep.
My soul to keep; my past a satchel; I’ve said all the words to go to sleep.
But flammable I combusts on the every-other hour. I eye
the unlit space until its atoms show, but still I can’t find sleep.
I find a clutch of hair, the girlhood grief, the words I wrote
on a paper boat. But for a thousand miles of stars, no sleep.
I sailed it, cast it, sunk it in my cheek: the hook to haul me here,
to beach me on this bedframe. Upturn me, spade me under, buy me sleep.
My dreams I got at the five-and-dime. Paid next to nothing
to see you, night after night, sleep after sleep.
I will trade you seven sleeps for one square foot of June ditch.
Your dreams’ population. Mine. Dog running though this field of sleep.
I will barter one hundred sleeps for one day of wakefulness,
one pinch, our bodies ferried, the peaches real. Sleep the only sleep.
Nicole, the peaches live. Nevermind the late frost; they grow fat
in their furred green coats; swell in drunken song until we sleep.
* * * * *
Ghazal w/ Open
The sign says closed, but I know it is open.
The door is locked, but I’m sure it is open.
I need a tank of gas. I need to be inside there.
To say I am shut tight, my mouth must open.
I want a Diet Coke, some Boston Baked Beans.
I want & want & want & want. I want to open.
In the story, the boy can chalk a door on anything;
walk into the boulder’s center, even. Rock: open.
So much on the planet: roses, windows, eyes, drawers
with lavender soaps: all with the capacity to open.
At capacity, I shutter up. Blinkered and boxed.
It’s humid, but there’s wind. Throw the sash open.
The sash, and me, my mind, the bottle, this ache,
the door, the floor beneath me. Throw it all open.
And then wind can blow clear through us, Nicole.
Every particle rearranged a little, changed, blown open.
/ / / / /
“Each of these ghazals was built gradually, in layers, often in the span of a day. One of us would choose the repeating word for the title, and the other would write the first couplet. Then, we’d alternate. We wrote in an online document, and we’d each pop in as we could. Some couplets were written while stirring dinner, some in the middle of the night, some while waiting in the parking lot for the kids to be done with camp, etc. Whomever chose the repeating word would write the final couplet, addressing the other by name, as in the tradition of ghazals. We hope that these poems work both as a record of correspondence — each ghazal a conversation, within the larger conversation of the collection — and as poems in a singular collaborative voice.” — Nicole Callihan and Zoë Ryder White
Nicole Callihan and Zoë Ryder White’s collaborative books include A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe 2015) and ELSEWHERE (Sixth Finch 2020). Their poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Harbor Review, and Plume.