Martha Silano
September 2, 1961 — May 5, 2025

Martha Silano’s latest collections are Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems (Saturnalia Books, 2025), Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025), This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024), and also include Gravity Assist (2019), Reckless Lovely (2014), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (2011), a Washington State Book Award finalist (all published by Saturnalia Books). She is also co-author, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and in many anthologies. Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize.

Soul Reckoning
from Presence 2021

“A 2021 Favorite” on Verse Daily

I’m skimming through a book called Spook:
Science Tackles the Afterlife.
It turns out gravity

doesn’t hold for souls; souls drift, like loons
between dives, into eternity, along
with NASA’s detritus—urine bags,

thousands of thin copper wires, a chunk of Apollo 12.
Knowing this, I leave behind five decades’s worth
of fear that I’ll die and no longer be,

that consciousness must be contained in a body.
To get here, I had to say goodbye to guilt,
to regret I didn’t attend the funeral

of my mother’s body, to wishing I could’ve helped
my cousins gather daisies from a field
down the road from where

they lowered her casket into a hole, to chime or chip in
about the words to engrave on her marking stone;
on all of this I punted, from all of this

I had excused myself on account of a plane ride,
the scepter of unmasked sobbing, sweating,
singing, cookies and punch.

To get here, I had to take the rutted road where they put
my mother’s body, a road rutted with limestone creatures
laid down in a shallow sea

500 million years ago. My travel speed is two inches per year,
same as the moon from Earth. A little less bound by gravity.
A little more free.