Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible - Softcover

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Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of three poetry collections, Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, 2024), The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014), winner of the Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012). She’s the recipient of an Amy Lowell Scholarship for Traveling Poets, a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the MacDowell Arts Colony. Poems from the most recent collection appear or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets (ed. Ada Limón), Missouri Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.

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To My Insulin Pump

You’re part of my anatomy now – port,

they call it. Into the flesh of my belly,

I insert a needle. Needle comes out, but

a tiny plastic capillary remains, affixed

to a button. Buoy on the surface of me.

Black, about the size of an old pager,

I wear you clipped to my bra like a spy.

When delivering insulin, I can hear and feel

a faint click-whir, click-whir near my heart,

a cat’s purr.  Fine plastic tubing runs from

my pump to my button. Somehow

umbilical. It unclasps with a quick twist

if I want a bath. Or to fuck unobstructed.

It would not be exaggerating to say you

(weight of a deck of cards, cost of a small car)

are literally keeping me alive – but I’ll just say

you, splendid little engine, are the only part

of me I never find it difficult to love.

Andean Pastoral

What’s left of an Incan wall

doilied by lichen – a place

once made then unmade.

Sacred. Grass expanse,

trumpeting cacti, trampled

petals of boneset. Slowly

I vanish into everything:

wedged stones, lizards plumping

in the sun, wind unspooling

in the lower field. I thought

I would feel sadder but

I just feel ghostless.

A little godfooted mouse

emerges. The world holds

itself somehow unimaginably

together. A black-winged bird

flares in the neglected arbor.

Sacsayhuamán

Human-hewn masterpiece

of mountain stones, it is

massive. There’s no other

word for it. Fortress, temple,

monument to the technology

of its Incan architects. Alfredo

jokes its name is pronounced

like sexy womán. It is sexy

if, like me, you’re drawn to

rune, to the sublime. Subtlety

has never really been my thing –

I swoon for the scale of all this.

We’re at 11,000 or so feet

altitude. I’m not falling asleep,

I’m plummeting, that feeling

the world has trap-doored

beneath you. I knock over

a lamp, grabbing the nightstand

to keep from black-holing down.

I wake with blood in my eye.

Chronic disease, not that sexy

but I won’t let it keep me

from clambering these ramparts.

Not when I’ve come this far.

The mortarless rhomboid rocks

almost fused, cellular, make shapes –

the puma’s paw, the guinea pig.

A three-tiered altar. A reservoir

long bereft of lake. And a door

opening onto the thin, cold clouds.

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