Assistant Editor Lisa Low: In Daniella Toosie-Watson’s “The Man I Do Not Sleep With,” the speaker and a potential lover lie in the park under a sky that’s “brighter, / ready to take you in, / not like a swallowing, no, but like sex.” The uniquely bright-blue sky, the grass, butterflies, and turtles in the poem are all part of a world that reimagines the typical relationship between lovers, but also between nature and the body. In this poem, the speaker’s perceptive inward/outward looking suggests a way of being that values complexity, for the crane to exist in the mind and “wherever it would like to be.”
To hear Daniella read her poem, click below:
The Man I Do Not Sleep With
Harlem, NY
In Morningside Park we lie in the grass, high,
the sky the kind of blue you see
when you’re high like we are: brighter,
ready to take you in,
not like a swallowing, no, but like sex, as in, if I
were to have it with you, if I could have it at all.
Now here comes the cliché:
two butterflies above your chest,
hovering there, and it’s true.
This grass could be a bed if it were not grass.
I remember my body under my clothes
is skin and I might as well not
be wearing clothes at all.
I assume the turtles are still piling on one another
scrambling for food on the water.
The crane, too, must still be there.
Unless it’s only in my mind that it stayed
where I last saw it. I hope the crane has gone
wherever it would like to be.
And I wish I could be more animal.
Not thinking about what it might cost me.
Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/her) is a poet from New York. Winner of the 92Y 2020 Discovery Award Contest, her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, and elsewhere. Daniella received her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
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