Pamela Alexander, featured in the new Ocean State Review

My Husband Lives Here

In the wind that blows through Sabino Canyon

In the water that bolts down Mt. Lemmon
after an August storm

Here, in the empty chair next to mine

On the pathways
behind my cat’s eyes,
in her neural network

She has no map
of time,
no X to mark his position

She would not be surprised
to see him

Code

His call sign was VA3 OF, his license
“extra” class, the highest.

I learned Morse
for the exam, became KD7 CRB, mere
technician.

Some letters are Sesame-Street easy,
like Q. Say Here comes the Queen

and you have it: dah dah dit dah.
Q is what trains say, he told me,

as they approach road crossings.

Now, without him, I listen

and critique. Sloppy code, I tell
my cat, or Nice and crisp.

Sometimes talky birds say it—
crows, ravens. They lay black tracks
in the sky.

Vertigo

The desert is deeper
than I thought, deeper

than thought, that
trickster, bait-
and-switcher,
rabbit snare.

Thought says I did
what I could, couldn’t do
otherwise.

Coyotes yell cryptic messages
through the cooling night.
Saguaros hold up stars
like candelabra.

My thoughts slip
against each other hard,
geological faulting.

Beneath sand
and caliche: slow
plates, miles of dark
rock, percolating water
and fire.

Pamela Alexander’s Left won the Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2024 Chad Walsh chapbook competition. She is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Slow Fire (Ausable/Copper Canyon). Earlier books won the Yale Younger Poet and Iowa Poetry Prizes. On the writing faculty at M.I.T. and Oberlin College for many years, she then spent five years traveling the continent in an RV with her cat. On the editorial board of FIELD, she also co-edited the 2020 book about Wendy Battin in the Unsung Masters series from Gulf Coast/ Pleiades/CopperNickel. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals and her essays in Cimarron Review and Denver Quarterly. She also writes mystery novels under the pen name Pam Fox. She lives in Maine.