Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you. by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.
Gabrielle CalvocoressiDo not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.
SELECTED BY MAYA C. POPA
Calvocaressi’s voice–intimate, plainspoken, surprising–invites us to experience bittersweet longing through a catalogue of shared experiences. And what a catalogue: shrimp saganaki, waterfall, autumn leaves.
But because this poet is so gifted at wrangling sound-sense, we get the utterly satisfying “Wish you” fragment to chime with what is a full and resonating sentence, “Miss you.” What a heart-seeing pleasure this poem is.
ABOUT MAYA C. POPA
Maya. C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) named one of the Guardian’s best books of poetry and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019) runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her third collection is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in July 2026. She is the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and founder and director of Conscious Writers Collective, an online MFA-style learning platform for poets and prose writers.
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This poem appeared in The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2025. (Available direct from Copper Canyon Press • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“The New Economymemorializes the world’s pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body.
A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You” poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary” one poems says. “Why don’t we have a name for it?” Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.” (Source)
ABOUT GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The New Economy (2025), Rocket Fantastic (2018), winner of the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, Apocalyptic Swing (2009), and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (2005). Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review, and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. She teaches… (more)
Read more poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Twitter • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 52 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: longing • grief • ghosts • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
