Letter to You About Home as a Song on Our Bodies

Issue 53 • Spring 2026 • Poetry

This poem won first place in the Spring 2026 Contest Issue judged by Hakim Bellamy, who wrote: “I’m a sucker for titles. Poem titles. An art unto itself…even when appropriately ‘Untitled.’ However, Wilson’s poem is way more than a poem titled in neon lights. From the very outset, Wilson invites the reader to hear color and see music. Sometimes poems read like sheet music, and this is that. Sometimes, an argument between two persons (in poem) over a word—no, an idea—as innocuous as the word ‘home’ is less cacophony and more symphony. And yes, oftentimes ‘[t]he heart, like the mind, chooses what it believes.’ Both my heart and mind agreed on their belief in this Lindsay Wilson poem.”

*

After a winter of deep snowpack,

some called it the Summer of Roses,

and so red rose from every garden,

strong and so blood-dark I heard music.

Did Anna hear it too, I wondered

beside our fenceline of wild roses

as my hands pulled the ripe fruit

of heirlooms from the overgrown mess

of San Marzanos and Brandywines.

I held those bright hearts free

from their bodies in my palms while

she blew smoke into our garden.

She must’ve been imagining her escape,

then, back south. How often we argued

over the word home. She believed

home happened to you, and I thought

we chose it. Home’s an honest mistake

like how every dusk that summer

she believed hummingbirds came

by the dozens to the long stemmed

catmint and suckled there until

the night crept in. The heart, like

the mind, chooses what it believes,

and I knew a sphinx moth when I saw

one, knew our bodies were always

our first homes, how we find our kin

crawling in the tomato vines

and honeysuckle, but later find ourselves

standing in another state feeling

the hum of wing-song on our skins,

as we drift among the flowers, uncoiling

our tongues for that nectar we all

somehow keep returning to.

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry