The Self Says, I Am

by melisssa crowe

•

The heart says, I am less;
The spirit says, I am nothing.

–Theodore Roethke

•

Say I’m clover and Queen Anne’s 

lace, devil’s paintbrush and lupine. 

I’m a yard of junked cars, each 

with its corona of broken glass 

and never-mowed grass. Dirt trail 

to cattail. My heart this sudden 

pond, this skipped stone. Say 

I’m a girl in a sundress, perpetual 

beginner in a cloud of bees 

and blackflies and my heart a foraged 

apple, still green. Say, o my bones, 

my heart’s a whiskey bottle 

glinting from the weeds. I pull 

a wagonload of hearts to the store 

at the end of my road, trade them 

for dimes, and say the dimes 

become my heart. They call this 

redemption. I’m the field of goldenrod 

behind the empty chicken house. 

My heart’s a span of wasted sheet metal 

that burns there noondays, blisters 

feet. Near suppertime, my heart’s 

the leaf that volunteers in the shade 

of the woodshed. It tastes of lemon 

and is safe to chew. Then my heart’s 

a bowl of poor man’s stew, salt broth

and slivers of meat. By bedtime 

I’m a learned, nimble girl, sunburned 

and yearning before the box fan. 

My heart the mosquito coil, the bugs 

blooddrunk. My heart the dishrag 

dipped in vinegar. The hand 

that soothes. The meager breeze. 

The heat. Before the moon draws back, 

dare I blaze like a tree? What if I’m 

this body, TV blue and sweating 

on a blanket of stiff wool, 

and my heart’s an old, sad dog, 

stretched out beside me? 

What can I tell my bones? 

Before they’re stones under stones, 

tell them the French words for summer, 

hunger, choice. That the nothing 

echoing the culvert is my voice. 

---

Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor; Lo (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize); and Abider, forthcoming in the fall of 2026.