Poem of the Week

Lani Scozzari, poet and classically trained actor and dancer, is cocreator and writer of Ballet’s Child, a semiautobiographical ballet documenting recovery from an eating disorder. She earned a BFA from Emerson College and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Scozzari lives with her husband and two daughters in Tequesta, Florida, where she teaches poetry and reading to elementary-age children.

Sheath, Erosion

by Lani Scozzari

It’s not as if it ever goes away,
as if it dissolves; the granules

are insoluble particles, two selves impacting
each other, irreversibly. What wavers between:


love, a choice I make each day. What has been,
settling residue sifting out to sea. Betrayal


of a husband—stone, palm, riverbed. Everything
else is illusion, everything else glints,


flashes, a vapor blown through.
When the cardinal chimes Morning


come back and the moon glows orange
as large as the sky, we run through


the fog. If he will stay, let me
know something. What is marriage? On the cusp


of fever, I ask myself. Tonight
I sat outside on the front porch, a swarm


of dragonflies darting past,
buzzing themselves against


my cheek then my leg, what
they needed unrevealed to me.
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