| WFR POETRY |
| WFR POETRY |
Eighteen months clean
by Rebecca Faulkner
your sponsor said did I not know
all those weeks imagining you
dead on a beach starving in a garret
blotting out miles of your life when he tells me
you moved on bought a house sweat springs
in patches on his peach polo shirt hairs on my arms
flourish from the force of your name spoken so casually
the stairwell spins I did not know
but I remember everything your stupid beautiful face
saplings bending how a person can disappear
& the breeze can just go on touching you
Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet and arts educator based in Brooklyn. The author of Permit Me to Write My Own Ending (Write Bloody Press, 2023), her work appears in New York Quarterly, Solstice Magazine, The Maine Review, CALYX Press, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest, and the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is currently at work on her second collection, exploring female identity and artistic endeavor. rebeccafaulknerpoet.com.