Two Poems by Arden Levine

FAR GONE

She is the one in all the songs:
passenger seat,
map on her thighs, toes dashing St. Christopher.

There is some place he took her from, or some place
she left with him, perhaps
they were tossed out

of the sky, lost their lease on God. So, El Camino
the drive, the unruly asphalt gardens,
the tailpipe fumes

like a long exhale, the tapering
of their history. They stop
only when there is no money or no gas,

or for her to wash his jeans, bent over
roadside rivers, the soft flesh
of her feet on stones. So long nowhere,

they’ve all forgotten her name (except for him),
so sometimes she is T_____, and
sometimes __t_______

and sometimes ___________. Until the day
she kneels in San Miguel and prays
for a little girl,

a small house, a patch of land, and the tune
turns from the engine’s southerly strum

to the percussion of her two heels

northward, at a breakaway run.

X-RAY

They like to
say funny things
and to look at lovely things
and to feel, deeply, things.

But, more so, they like
the familiar uncomfortable and
the accustomed unpleasant and
the habitual uneasy.

They are lying in bed with a
lead apron for a blanket. They are
seen through and they are
weighted down.

---

Arden Levine is the author of Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Sixth Finch, and other journals, and been featured in AGNI Online, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and WNYC’s Radiolab. Arden lives, and does urban housing policy work, in New York City.