This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Autobiography of Rain by Lana Hechtman Ayers (Fernwood Press 2024).
Things You Will Only Learn About Me When It’s Too Late
Listen to me as one listens to the rain
—Octavio Paz
I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut
so I could escape the gravity of childhood.
My first crush was on the winter night sky.
In a crowd of people, mosquitoes bite me first.
Sleep was never a friend.
Barbie, a sworn enemy with her wasp waist
and long, straight blonde locks.
My dark hair never grows much below my ears.
Hula hoops and I reached a discordant truce.
I failed at everything,
some things more than once,
some things hundreds of times.
This hasn’t stopped me trying.
The forest canopy is my adopted family.
Coffee is a verb.
Poetry is breakfast.
My heartbeat aligns with Atlantic Ocean’s pulse.
Klutz, I have spent my entire life falling.
First, in love with shadow, then chiaroscuro.
Once, I pitched down a hill in a city park,
would have kept rolling forever except my head
collided with a cedar tree and stopped me—
thankfully the tree was unharmed.
I trip over words, especially goodbye.
I fell into Mathematics as a major in college
and am still solving for x.
I stumbled into the oblivion of Earl Grey
ice cream and never stumbled back out.
I teeter on the see-saw of self-love
with a fulcrum of constant panic
that balances things out nicely.
My life story is the autobiography of rain.
Cat mama, dog mama, sky-watcher, and former New Yorker Lana Hechtman Ayers earned an MFA in Poetry from New England College. She has authored 4 chapbooks, 9 full-length poetry collections, and has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The London Reader, Peregrine, One Art, and others. In her role as managing editor, she’s ushered 150 poetry collections into the world. Lana is a recovering coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon on the unceded land of the Yaq’on people, on clear quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.
Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), along with transfinity (forthcoming from Lambhouse Books). Their recent work appears in Solstice, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.
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