The poems of Tobi Alfier explore relationships, mostly broken.

Navigating relationships can be difficult. Marriage relationships. Parent-child relationships. Relationships between siblings or friends. They can break, again for all kinds of reasons. And it’s the aftermath of these breaks, and people traveling through modern life, that poet Tobi Alfier explores in Goodbye Kisses: Poems.

In Alfier’s poems, the people involved wander afterward in a desolate landscape. It doesn’t matter who might have been right and who was wrong. Enough desolation exists for everyone. Some try to move on quickly. Others linger, immobilized. They walk beaches. They visit bars. They trace their hands over old carved initials in a tree. Some sit in old motel rooms, alcohol in a paper cup. Some sit at kitchen tables and stare.

Aubade for Ada

He sits at his kitchen table, whispers grace.
Pale green of the nicked-up seating for two
washed by an odd cloudy light through lace.
Even the most masculine have these curtains,

a way to look out at the bay, gauge the unholiness
of storms a comin’, or ferries already leapt off
toward the mainland, empty creels to be dropped,
empty kegs to be filled, the women gone.

Ada gone. He thought it was a dream.
She said his name, pulled her collar up, a radiant
wildflower over her ear, to be worn home
and pressed into a book of memories.

Last night she called him her merchant of broken promises.
Sad words of truth whispered like a prayer, not absolved
by what they both knew was their last night together.
Tangled limbs and tears, a memorial written

in the streetlight’s gleaming reach, the orchestra
of waves upon the sea. She will always hold his heart
the way petals mark a path through flowering fields,
the way an evening slips in unawares, under heavy rains.

These poems aren‘t necessarily depressing pictures of contemporary life and relationships. Alfier pulls you into stories, almost as an observer. She uses detail to maximum effect, like the cloudy light entering through lace curtains. Or a wildflower positioned behind an ear. Or trying but failing to read an address on the back of a photograph. The poems are about loss, yes, but they’re also a kind of warning, a reminder to pay attention before the breakage occurs.

Alfier writes poetry and flash fiction. She’s been nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards, and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines. Her previously published books include Lapses & Absences: Selected Poems, The Coincidence of Castles, Hostage Negotiation in Negative-Land, Carpeting the Stones, Romance and Rust: New and Selected Poems, Down Anstruther Way, Somewhere, Anywhere, Doesn’t Matter Where: Poems, Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies, Sanity Among the Wildflowers, and Symmetry: earth and sky: Poems.

The poems of Goodbye Kisses are deeply affecting. You experience the aftermath of heartbreak. You lie sleepless, “the night full of ghosts and broken / promises, a restless wait for dawn.” And you think about what was, and what might have been, wondering where it went wrong.

Photo by Gabiel Caparo, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

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