Peel back my eyelids and kiss kiss. Leave a coinon each plump cheek. In a time of quarrelI became a fine quartz pendant on a leather string.I became a quark. A quantum wiggle. A flinging speckthat pops and pulls through space. I couldn’tundead the day. Unstable and nonlinear, I unpredicted.I kicked my feet in the river but noodled nothing.No catfish the size of small vans. No lost menin scuba gear. If once the river flowed backwards,while birds disappeared, well so what. If oncethe ground shook, the light in its pendant mountswaying above the kitchen table. I was asleep then.If I leave a coin for you it is because I love youlike the river loves its mud. No. It is because I am tryingto buy you. I am trying to pull you into my heart.I was a mother once too. I suckled one baby.I suckled two. I left fresh flowers in my children’srooms, and a coin to bloom into better dreams.In my dream I held your hand and we went to the river.It was night. The air laden with tulip-scent.Mossy rocks fringed the shore. I mean bank.At the bank I pulled out two coins. I mean,when we got to the river, I pushed you in. When?When the river washed you clean. Your memory,I mean. When you died, I mean. I mean, you floated.On each eye I placed a coin. I mean a petal.And in your froggy ear I whispered, Get lost.
Get Lost Serenade
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Get Lost Serenade,” from The Sweating Sickness by Rebecca Lehmann. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Andrea D'Agosto
Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections The Sweating Sickness, Ringer and Between the Crackups. Her writing has been featured in NPR’s The Slowdown, The American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and other venues. Her debut novel, The Beheading Game, a speculative fiction ghost story about Anne Boleyn, is forthcoming from Crown in March of 2026. She lives in Indiana.
Rebecca Lehmann’s The Sweating Sickness contains wide-ranging topics—the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairy tales, reproductive rights, domestic violence, ghost stories, ancient myth—all set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means to be a woman in post-Roe America, and how private and public ghosts can come back to haunt us. Surrealist, maximalist, formal, and with an ear to the underworld, The Sweating Sickness spins the reader into an eco-fabulist wonderland, where anything can happen, and does.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
