Lisa Hiton
In the Air Tonight
It was winter.
I barely ate all year.
There was no time
when time was
with you, all
became hot
to the touch,
my hair, my
sleeve, my
fingers on
the stove.
Only, the stove
was an idea.
Not of a stove,
but of being.
A pan on the stove
with the heat on high
changed butter
into liquid.
We stumbled in and out
of every door
on Church St.,
oh lord. That street
was the stove of my being.
And the snow—
on the ground,
and in the air,
landing on my hair—
reacted all over,
emitted a frequency
up and down the alley.
Before, the stove
was just an idea
upon which I made
what fed me.
But I could feel it
coming in the air
on Church St., just outside
the Sinclair.
Not that you were behind me
coming back
down the alley
to embrace me, in public,
mouth to mouth
breast to breast.
But that my body
was no longer an idea.
I was changing fully
without you. My mind
absorbing that infrared.
In the air tonight,
while you were feeling
the lightness of flakes,
my mind changed
into the darkness
through which
they fell.
Lisa Hiton reads “In the Air Tonight”
Lisa Hiton’s debut book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize and is available from Tupelo Press. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Arts in Education from Harvard University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, NPR, Lambda Literary, Linebreak, The Paris-American, New South, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, and Denver Quarterly among others. She has received the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, the Esther B. Kahn Scholarship from 24Pearl Street at the Fine Arts Work Center, and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks The Clearing (Black Lawrence Press) and Variation on Testimony (CutBank). She is the Founder and Producer of Queer Poem-a-Day at the Deerfield Public Library. The podcast has been featured in classrooms and libraries across the US.