In this week’s poem, Annaliese Jakimides muses on loss and its confounding aftermath. I love this poem’s ache and urge toward tangible forms, even as they only glimmer in memory and in the air.

Jakimides is a writer and mixed-media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family on 40+ acres in Northern Maine, growing almost all their food and pumping water by hand. Her poetry and prose have been broadcast on Maine Public and NPR, and included in many journals, magazines and anthologies— most recently Rivers of Ink: Literary Reflections on the Penobscot.

Isolation Assignment

My hungers are small. Often nothing.
Sometimes everything. It’s you
who could feed me—your words, your
face, your last days of skin and bones
in a sloppy white t-shirt, the dust of your
footsteps. You said I’m intended to
make a new life,
somewhere with someone,
welcome words tripping off a new tongue
from a new mouth
lighting up a new face. Even as I go on
to imagine slump of skin, stumble
of snore in the blind night, bodies run mad,
how, I must ask, does the face
[with the mouth and the tongue,
the words and all the rest] find its way
through this thistle of virus, your iridescence
still shimmering on the emptied plate?

– Annaliese Jakimides

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Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Isolation Assignment,” copyright ©2024 by Annaliese Jakimides, was originally published in Wait: Poems from the Pandemic (Littoral, 2021). It appears by permission of the author.