You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being. —Pedro Almodóvar

Need another word, not irony, for what happened when I fell
in love not-quite-with-you-but- with your poem about falling

in love with the idea of a woman, with a myth, with history,
with wanting to ask do you want to go swimming? to someone

who was never real but maybe also was, or maybe who’s the realest
when we all believe in her. (Clap, clap, goes the idea of Audience. Fairy-wings.)

I wanted to reach through the fourth wall and touch you, but the wall was not
a wall, it was a screen: your lipstick smile on the other side of it. So close

and way-too-far, and when you touched my (real, small, living, human) hand
in the park, just once, by accident, I full-body-unlocked in a way I didn’t know

what else to call except love, but maybe it was more like seeing,
or like the future’s aperture opening up to living-through-it—

me face-to-face with some other me, the one I hadn’t
been, yet. I know it’s boring, but I’m saying you changed me.

I’d still call that love, but love’s the loaded-est of loaded guns,
and all I want this thing to mean is open seas of something soft

or looking at you looking at the sky and thinking closer. Full-volume radio,
every stupid pop song I used to be too-scared to sing along to.

I guess I’ll never know, or care, what kind of love this is except the truest
kind I’ve ever felt: the kind where all the women stay alive

in this weird picture—my hands / your hands in separate oceans, girl-fish
bodies underwater, all the tallest marbled opalescent statues of ourselves:

full-frame visible, longed-for (wanted wanted wanted wanted) by some brief myriad
(who knows how long) (I know: not long) of infinite, enamored strangers’ eyes.

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Prompt: Instructions to be Followed, Revised, and/or Ignored

1) Scholar Jay Leyda describes Dickinson’s poems as often having an “omitted center” — I take
this to mean that sometimes her poems are about something that can’t quite be said directly, or
that something important has been left offstage. Write a poem that works this way, in whatever
way you find meaningful. Remember that “success in circuit lies.”

2) Use a uniform stanza length (couplets, tercets, quatrains, etc). Metric choices are up to you. If
you’re going to break your own constraint, you’d better do it for a reason.

3) It is often the case that the I in a poem both does and does not speak for its author. This works
in different ways in different poems. Write a poem in which the I is fairly close to your lived
human self, like the part of an asymptote where the line approaches infinity. Consider subjectivity
as an unsolvable math problem, unless this gets in your way.

4) If you’re bored of your own errors, try creating some new ones. Franco “Bifo” Berardi says
poetry does this, and I like to think he’s right.

5) Say something true, even if it pains you. Otherwise aren’t you just wasting your own time (and
possibly that of your reader)?

6) On the other hand, consider the truth to be found in fiction.

7) Refer to mythology in some way. There are plenty to choose from. Proceed from an abundant
mood. Poetry, like living, thrives in contradiction.

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Jo(ely) Fitch is a poet living, thinking, reading, and walking in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. Find her in most of the usual webspace places: @joelyfitch on Twitter/X, @jo_elyly on Instagram, @jo-ely.bsky.social on Bluesky, and joelyfitch.com. Jo coedits Atmospheric Quarterly.