POEM OF THE MONTH
February
Love & Sex
Phalanx by Derek Mueller
The Keeping of Secrets Among Forgetful Lovers
My wife doesn’t want me to write about her superpower. The world should not know how she howls down the moon and turns an ordinary day into something the Hubble telescope might see from a billion years ago when the earth still steamed with cracks and fissures, when eukaryotes teemed and cells were strung together like glass beads. Of course, I say, I won’t tell about when we find a warm place on this first winter night and you find me in my cave of covers pulled over my head reading Sappho and “Sonnets from the Portuguese” through fogged glasses—my grinding teeth trussed with my Oral-B mouthguard, or that you conjure, by merely sliding in beside me, the desire to sigh and imagine myself as a small god visiting from the mountains suddenly convinced that it’s better to be human and die than be a boundless body, incorruptible and shining like a golden calf in Sinai’s sun. And why would I tell of these things that so many know on this very night, when a billion lovers lie tangled, even those like me, whose rotting body’s wasting is so advanced that when I get up in the night to pee, I do dribble a bit and forget to put the toilet seat down, mistake the closet door for our bedroom, and slide to the floor and dream of sleeping alone.
she gasps —
my hands are
so cold
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, Sugar House Review and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig.
Lately, many of my poems are versions of “no one told me about this!” sort of revelations. No one told me my body would fail and my desires wouldn’t. No one told me as we got older my wife’s and my love would become even more incandescent. No one told me that sometimes I’d prefer sleeping alone no matter how much I longed for my lover’s skin. Of course, had I read poetry as a younger man I would have known all this because poems have a way of telling all our secrets - even without our permission - and sometimes even our loved one’s secrets (with her permission, of course!).
We received a whopping 728 submissions for this month, and many of them were brilliant and fiery. Dick Westheimer’s “The Keeping of Secrets Among Forgetful Lovers” stood out to us for its tenderness, humor, and vulnerability. It captures the magnificent contradictions of long-term love with disarming honesty. I’m captivated by how the haibun moves from cosmic imagery — “when the earth still steamed with cracks and fissures” — to the intimate mundanity of a nighttime routine with “grinding teeth trussed with my Oral-B mouthguard.” This dance between the sublime and ordinary mirrors the poem’s emotional core: how desire persists even as bodies fail. I love also how the middle section subverts the speaker’s promise not to tell, creating a delicious tension that pulls us deeper into their shared secrets. I’m surprised how the punch of the ending remains even as we expect it — “she gasps— / my hands are / so cold” — goosebumps! Love sits at the intersection of desire and death and this poem reveals that secret to us perfectly.
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