This poem first appeared in Winter 2012 issue of The Antioch Review.

TWO SINGERS SANG NOT TOGETHER
by Christina Hutchins

I loved her but never did we play
the laughing game early the morning rumple never
look a book what we sore were wont to know
never we laugh the night & never the rain
savored fully wetly though I wished it so & thought it
so— yet curled round her softness my skin came her
skin yet her hair remained loosed & pillowed her
yet purely her nape remained the curve of her spine
toward & away— how far can love travel alone?
when never each other prod of the question when steam
of the billow bath & its ownly songs clarity of
a water bent world my meadow of rain sprouting down
the window glass hours another season commences
when never did the longing full rest

***

Christina Hutchins is the author of Tender the Maker, winner of the 2015 May Swenson Award (forthcoming, Utah State University Press / University Press of Colorado, forthcoming) , The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Prize, and Radiantly we Inhabit the Air (Robin Becker Chapbook Prize, 2011) . Her essays on philosophies of creativity appear in volumes by Ashgate, Columbia University Press, and State University of New York. Poetry awards include The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize,National Poetry Review’s Annie Finch Prize, Barbara Deming Awards, the James Phelan Award, and fellowships to Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She holds degrees from UC Davis, Harvard, and Graduate Theological Union, and is currently Lecturer in Theology and Literary Arts at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.

© 2015 The Antioch Review