For you, I have left my clothes on the floor.

   I have left windows open in the bedroom.

 

We might scandalize the neighbors. We might

   entertain the house painters. We might

 

captivate a stag line of squirrels on the telephone

   wire, watching what we do: touch both tender

 

and terrifying: naked fate in small furies of love.

   Pairs of fleshly doors that open to rapture or

 

metaphor: a chance to be momently carried across

   into somewhere, something, someone else.

 

***

Heather Treseler’s Parturition (2020) won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize, and her sequence “The Lucie Odes” received Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize (2019). Her poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Cincinnati Review, PN Review, Southern Humanities Review, Harvard Review, Boston Review, and The Iowa Review, and her essays about poetry appear in LARB, Boston Review, and in six books about American poetry. She is associate professor of English and the Presidential Fellow for Art, Education, and Community at Worcester State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Center.