I Explain the Dark Center by Lindsay Illich

Editorial intern Brian Czyzyk on today's bonus poem: Lindsay Illich’s “I Explain the Dark Center” carries an earthy sensuality and juxtaposes a curious combination of images: a bathtub, tomatoes, and volcanic rock, as a collage of heartbreak. Loss paints the narrator’s Earth blue with “warm sorrow,” and stone-like hips are worn down to bone within Illich’s tight and evocative lines.

I Explain the Dark Center

It started with your eyes
calling from the tub to come

get me, bring me your warm
sorrow. The part of losing you

I can’t get over is how you grow
despite my not watering you:

I threw seeds out the window
and this year I pick all the tomatoes

I want. You said, it’s the humidity.
Yes, I approve the antediluvian.

No rain but everywhere lush
the Earth found blue.

Your hip crests, a caldera of pumice
we rubbed and rubbed like worry

until we were worn down
to the bone.

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Lindsay Illich's first book, rile & heave, won the Texas Review Press Breakout Prize in Poetry.