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Habit
My husband’s favorite is to suffer.
I too have taken this up;
I pant for what I can’t have.
The world is full of trite regard.
Those who love lightly as houseflies
do so because they expect calamity,
and those who love passionately
demand a righting of ancient wrongs.
My mother did both.
Her voice high and keen
from the bed she routinely took ill.
I brought her pills; she shared them
with me and I went off into my own life,
fearing and trusting everyone.
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Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place, winner of the 2023 Alice James Award, co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024), and author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She was a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work won a Pushcart Prize in 2024, and was featured in the Best of the Net 2023 anthology and Best New Poets 2022. Currently she is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
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