Vessel

by Ali Beheler

Remember how
they overtook us, how
we’d learn one and then find it everywhere?

I can still hear my little brother
squeal, spread the Y of his arms
wide across the window shouting truck! truck!

even when it was a minivan or bus
that spun by outside;
how two friends and I once wailed,

transfixed, as just saying it made everything
around us turn into pie—
how easily all things wore the veil

of outsides revised into crusts,
imaginary quiver
of filling, gelatinous. But how did they

do it? Slide like holograms
from each separate letter
with its own name we first had to learn

to see, to a new thing suddenly,
those letters like bones
holding up one jointed body

that shone
illuminating for us
what was always here

that sang
out of our mouths
what was always here

themselves rising up
out of all things
for our credulity—but us out of us,

unimmaculate, breath-born,
consummate
ashes resonating from the ground.

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Ali Beheler’s recent work appears in The Shore, SRPR, Rogue Agent, Tupelo Quarterly, Harpur Palate, ballast journal, and elsewhere. Winner of the SRPR Editor’s Prize (2024) and the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry (2025), as well as residencies at Sundress Academy for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, she teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE. Find her at www.alibeheler.com.