Here’s a Love Poem to Joel

I love how you cradle my head with your hands, our faces so close, I bite the square of your chin. I love tonguing its fine sandpaper of stubble below the bottom lip still tasting of the Old Fashioned you made with the dark cherries that can only be ordered, and the way you popped open that jar—because man! those hands; I love their pretty shape and tight strength, how everything fits in the smooth pocket of each palm, even when they’re freezing-cold because I won’t raise the thermostat above 65, so that’s what you get for that as you press them to me like a pair of ice packs and I feel inside me your laughter reverberating like a gong, cracking me up, our laughter coming together. 

Rachael Peckham is the author of Alight: Flights of Prose (UnCollected 2022) and a chapbook of prose poems, Muck Fire (Spring Garden 2011). Her essays and prose poems have won prizes at Briar Cliff Review, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, Orison Books, Spring Garden Press, and Tupelo Quarterly, and she received honorable mention twice in the Best American Essays series. Rachael is a Distinguished John Deaver Drinko fellow and professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she lives with her husband, essayist and poet Joel Peckham.

A Song for Rachael