Claire Millikin – Poetry

In this elegy by Claire Millikin, “Winter Record Store,” the image of a record keeps resonating and changing. There’s the record-breaking cold on the night of this poem. There are the written records that preserve dates and events, preserve what is passing; there are the record disks that capture voices in time so they can be replayed and heard again. As disks or circles, records go round and round, as if beginning and end continuously repeat. And then there is the voice of the lost one that lives on within us, even as the body is gone. All this, Millikin evokes while also reminding us that there’s no stopping change: there aren’t many record stores left, the children have turned inward . . .

In “After a Line from Wallace Stevens,” Millikin again reminds us that “time is time was time . . . sharper than our stories”—as if what was doesn’t disappear, but only changes form, event becomes memory, people long gone still haunt us. “It was snowing and going to snow.”

Claire Millikin is the author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry. Millikin’s forthcoming book of poems, Nightlight (expected in June 2026), traverses histories of violence in the deep South.

—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor

 

Winter Record Store

 

I was not ready for the way ghosts speak,
as if coming from inside me, when it’s nothing

but the transitus as she makes her crossing. Record

 

cold tonight, the moon a frozen vinyl disc brightens wing-
shaped fox tracks in the snow. We should go

buy records—the store’s still open and school

children have turned inward, but music waits at the ridge.

Record stores barely exist anymore. I was unprepared

for the way ghosts address the living

 

through our own mouths, listen—
let’s go to the record store, it’s getting cold,

down below zero tonight,

let’s buy what they once sang, we’ll go slow, then slower.

The way oak trees survive winter

hibernating, stilling into dormancy, let’s play dead.

It wasn’t right, half the things she did
but records only play what was sung,

tempo tempo Rosina, Tatyana, Carmen—

sing Chrissie, Patti, Nina. The record will play

a small universe with sharp stars.
Maybe it’ll take all night to get there,

or maybe we’ll never arrive to purchase

the song she no longer sings. As in a room

of heavy snow time returns cold.

 

 

After a Line from Wallace Stevens

 

The way time shifts in its wrapping,
a gift disarrayed on opening,
at the bus stop, clean after heavy snow, we were waiting.

It was snowing and it was going to snow,
time is time was time.

Time, sharper than our stories,
once was a rough boy out of Georgia’s forests,

black-haired, blue-eyed. Try
to bring back the ashes but nothing
survives that kind of fire, not even light.

We invite him, of course, to sit down—

bullshit talk and snow unfolding from doors and windows
as if we were forgiven or at least forgivable,
as if we hadn’t burned the sun with our hearts.

It can’t matter now, matterless as any fading star.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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