ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020) and the founder of the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American. Smith is a Teaching Professor and Director of Career Development in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
January 14, 2026
Numbering the Days
What we call love is just the numbering of days — one
night in the bar dark with friends, a pitcher, two sloshed
pints, shared mozzarella with a trinity of sauce. New
recipes for sage. All the ways to distract a cat — food,
food, a warm bed, touch, necklace strung from height.
Fridays with nothing as good as the hot of a shower,
not killing the spider cricket slouching there. It’s seven
and I only know because I’m eating again, sour corn and
leather britches we made to know this place we live,
where things must last to survive. I ate each bite and
thought of you, all the things you’ve touched — this
faucet, that towel, every penny in the jar. I tire of this
mooniness. It’s not often we get what we need, though
sometimes in the windowed night, I think about one
thing but get a phone, your laugh on the end, and touch
the place it curls in my ear, pretend it’s your hand
counting all the places I want it to be.
“Numbering the Days” is part of my fourth full-length manuscript which centers on the grief of a partner’s deployment. It was also an attempt to playfully count from one to ten over the course of the poem. I’ll be the first to tell you some of those numbers are more slippery than others, but I wanted to use the act of counting up, which is a major part of the structure of the manuscript, as a guiding tool in the construction of the poem. This was meant as a way to consider time, what we do to fill it, to get from one day to the next while struggling with one’s existence. Each of these numbers centers something small — a dive bar, a shower, a meal — and how each is step in survival.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
