Amy Spizzo

Photographer: Brian McConkey H/MUA: Me

Headshot for Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of three collections of poetry and recent recipient of The Orison Anthology Award in fiction.

One of my favorite poems from Ms. Frank is The Girlfriend Elegies, published in The New Yorker, October 15, 2018.
It is soul-crushingly beautiful...

I did not find the body.
It was wintertime where I was; women gathered

in bars. Their bodies like bare trees,
naked arms giving fruit to hands

in gestures. Ice was everywhere.
I could still feel the command of your hands

around a woman’s waist
when two-stepping—it was the only time

you wore joy. Your anger muscular
in your small tired body that always hurt.

I had seen your childhood once—there
was a hole in the wall of the living room.

It led somewhere.
Outside, the land was dry, grassless.

We had come to rescue the dog,
whom we found wrestling her chain in the dirt.

There was a lake somewhere nearby,
but no sign of it except boats behind cars.

Later, I learned your father was a sculptor,
your mother what we now call a hoarder.

The road home was long, more dryness.
Even the dog was wrapped in silence.

We slept in the back of the truck, our heads
at the opening, watching stars fall.

The future then a mirage: a place I’d save you.
I bought you things on my credit card.

We drank in the bars where everyone knew you and
the Southwest summer burned

through and then there were months
in which I tried to escape,

your drowning like a clasp around my throat.
I fled in the night. Years passed.

In the dry climates, there is less of an odor.
There was no sign of the dog

when they found you dead in your chair:
it had been days.

I thought of the woman in Croatia,
lying dead for decades in her apartment.

No one to find her. Find you.
There was a word for you back then,

mischievous in that one picture—
when we went to the mountains, your body

woke up from the mysterious illness—alert fawn,
a boy body freed

momentarily from a terrible girlhood.
Which is not to say you would ever have wanted

to be a man. Which is not to say
I could have saved you.

By day she’s a fun-loving twenty-one-year-old sweetheart. By night she’s an ass-kicking MMA cage fighter who was totally game for me giving her a black eye.

Lovely lady fighter: Savanna Rae Savage
📸: Markus Giolas
💇🏻‍♀️&💄: Me
Retouching: