Jonah Miller (Lone Pine) 𐂂

from: [email protected]

to: [email protected]

subject: FINAL NOTICE: [redacted]

It arrives at 3:33 in the morning,

phone burning a halo into my chest.

Dear valued soul,

I know this trick.

The one where I’m supposed to grasp

onto valued like the same dog

that always foams at the mouth

for love.

My throat is bleeding unnamed.

His violence looks a lot like my mother’s.

We have detected unusual activity associated with your account:

Multiple failed prayer attempts.

A heart logging in from unauthorized locations.

One body repeatedly reported missing from itself.

Suspicious longing behind the sternum.

Please click the link below to verify you are human.

I click it,

fear thick in my carotid.

The CAPTCHA says:

Select every image containing a home.

There is a porch.

A hospital waiting room.

The passenger seat of my father’s truck.

A bed with one side untouched.

A body curled on the bathroom floor.

A kitchen with nobody speaking.

I select all of them.

Incorrect. Please try again.

God offers me a thirty-day free trial

of unconditional love.

No credit card required.

I laugh into the void

until the stars echo back

with screaming.

It is not heaven.

You have been pre-approved for forgiveness.

Your suffering may qualify for expedited delivery.

Resurrection is available in participating locations only.

Terms and conditions apply.

User agrees to release all previous handlers from liability.

All waste placed in the body becomes the responsibility of the body.

Failure to comply with these terms will result in additional lessons.

There is an image that will not load

with the caption:

YOUR BODY WAS NEVER A CLERICAL ERROR.

The screen stutters.

Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

My hand fades into static.

I write back.

Then why was I shipped with

someone else’s name on the label?

Why make the heart soft

if every hand arrives armed?

Why did you give me a pulse

with no instructions

for what to do when it sounds

like knocking from inside a coffin?

A red message appears.

Delivery failed.

This inbox is not monitored.

In small letters

at the end of it all:

You are receiving this message because you once requested a sign.

I do not remember consenting.

Maybe it was on the bathroom floor.

Maybe it was between one heartbeat

and the next one I was certain

would not come.

Maybe I agreed when I was a child

and still believed heaven kept records

more carefully than my mother did.

There is an unsubscribe button.

I press it.

Are you sure you no longer wish

to receive communication from God?

No.

Yes.

No.

I close the app

and lie there listening

to the electrical hum of everything

that knows how to keep living

without believing in itself.

I open the junk folder again.

The email is missing.

I check the trash.

Even God’s rejection

leaves no body.

A fault line cracked open my chest years before I knew how to stay steady. I don’t always know how to divide weather until after it breaks me. Trembling in its wake only ever taught me how to grieve the end of every relationship before the hazard lights were even flashing.

Disappearance looked good on my shoulders until the weight of it was less resilience and more funeral pyre in the eaves. Pine smoke caught in my teeth, as if earthquakes could be prevented by burning.

Does my resolve make holding look easy?

Bodies don’t look enticing halfway in the grave, but it is my own survival you are witnessing. Decomposition doesn’t always suggest finality. There’s more to me than dirt-stung eyes and bloody knees.

Forgive me, I was not born with seismology. I embodied ravine more than man, and still know how to check the cracks for emergencies.

I know, I know, my own blood on my hands is dismaying, drawn out by unsafe guarantees and the quiet hemorrhage of becoming.

I loved being the disaster until intensity learned it could be more than ravaging.

I cradled my heart in my palms, still gentle despite the fighting, and practiced taxidermy until it turned to craft, until it turned to reverence, until it turned to vitality.

I want more, always. My heart can know the rot and still make room for you. I can hold the walls steady even when the ground is shifting.

Refusal of easy resilience

is where the floor tilts.

No one tells you

how a man’s hands in your presence

are like staring directly

at a thousand tiny suns,

until you’re blue with forgetting,

the wet rocks

would give anything to take from you.

Lighthouses lean toward more than one ship.

Safety has always come to me jagged,

unwilling to be invulnerable.

Smooth would be too forgiving,

the way his hands would burn

if they touched me.

I was never one to leave well enough alone,

but my body is still doing

the blood-letting in quiet places.

It’s not refusal so much as prophecy.

The ocean is too heavy

to risk holding only one thing.

Would he burn out

if he got too close to me?

Would I risk the warmth in it?

I have always been tilting toward it,

edging myself with the pitch.

The body ends up cold either way.

Written by Jonah Miller (lone pine poetry)

I know the standard reading of the skunks is all about life moving on, but to me, the ending isn't about continuity. It’s about faking continuity.

It’s telling that the skunks only appear after the speaker calls himself hell: “I myself am hell; / nobody’s here— / only skunks…” Right before that, Lowell gives us the senile heiress, the “summer millionaire” whose yawl is auctioned off, and “our fairy / decorator” who “brightens his shop for fall” with orange corks and awls but “there is no money in his work, / he’d rather marry.”

To me, these are all examples of people just trying to survive the hand they were dealt. A woman buying up property to keep her world quiet. A man decorating around decay because if life is rotting around you, you might as well make it look nice. What makes this even sharper is the contrast with the heiress’s son (a bishop) and her farmer (first selectman). They have gone out into the world and made something of their lives, not only for personal benefit, but for the community around them. This backs up the point: what are the central figures (the woman, the decorator, the speaker) doing with their lives besides avoidance? They opt for containment and retreat rather than engagement or contribution.

The car scene is really where it all comes together. “I watched for love-cars…A car radio bleats, / “Love, O careless Love…” / I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat…” He’s sitting there struggling with his own loneliness, listening to a radio song that talks about love as careless.

What's great about that radio song is that it isn’t a sweet love story; it's about a love that destroys you. Whether you look at Hugh Laurie's version ('I’ll be damned if I let you rob me out of my soul') or Billie Holiday's variation on W.C. Handy ('we are growing used to soul-less souls'), the theme is the same: opening yourself up to someone ruins you. That shifts how I read the whole stanza. He’s not watching those couples with envy; he's looking at love as a genuine threat to his safety.

It gets even more interesting when you know the backstory. That whole line, “I watched for love-cars,” comes from an anecdote about Walt Whitman doing the exact same thing, except Whitman walked away happy for those couples. For Whitman, love was beautiful; for Lowell, it’s a dark, alienating mess. (Robert Lowell: Selected Poems; Unforgotten Years by Logan Pearsall Smith).

The choice of skunks is so specific. He could’ve picked any creature to represent staying alive, but skunks are defined by their defense mechanism. When threatened, they spray to cause temporary blindness and severe pain. That feels like his exact forecast for love: a violent reaction that blinds you and leaves you hurting.

Once you see the skunks as his reflection, the ending completely changes. It’s not about finding a way to survive. It’s about retreat. In the end, he’s no better than the woman buying up isolation, or the decorator staying stuck in a job that gives him nothing back. He isn't surrendering to the natural flow of life; he’s actively choosing to stay stuck.

The mother skunk with her column of kittens is particularly interesting. Traditional readings might see it as resilient family life persisting amid decay and evidence of continuity. But to me, it implies an animal family unburdened by the costs of human emotions and the way humans experience intimacy. The skunks forage in garbage, spray when threatened, and “will not scare,” embodying defensive survival. If the speaker doesn’t risk human connection with its potential for heartbreak, soul-destroying carelessness, and exposure, he stays safer. It feels as if he's trying to convince us (and himself) that he’s content. He gets clean air, the skunks live like nothing matters save for instinct, and he doesn't have to be afraid.

It is interesting that every image involving skunks in the poem consists of a group of them surviving together. He could have chosen to speak of a solitary skunk, just like the hermit and decorator, but he grants them connection he denies himself. The idea that the skunks have a family points to an innate life we all have. We technically always do have connection through family, yet the car scene is so pivotal in its entirety that maybe familial love is not enough when you see evidence of more before you.

Is it also possible that he views himself as the skunk, managing to survive by the instinctual qualities he possesses as we all do with the limited source of love through family, while also comparing himself to a threat? Does he believe if someone gets too close, it is he who will hurt them out of pure self-defense against potential harm? Is that why the song about careless love in the earlier stanza causes him to feel like every blood cell in his body is sobbing? Doesn’t he tell us this when he says “I myself am hell” rather than saying, “I myself am in hell?” Lowell’s history with manic depression and volatile relationships heavily informs this.

At the end of the day, isn’t he just opting out of a particular human, vulnerable, “love-car” kind of love entirely? The hermit has her son, her farmer, and her cottage. The decorator has his shop. The millionaire has his money. The speaker even implies his own possible family in the last stanza: “I stand on top of our back steps.” There is connection possible for even the loneliest of people, but that does not always equal true contentment when avoidance of openness is threaded so cleanly through it.

And he said:

“I don’t want to warn you, dearest, against exposing yourself to such excitements, even if they should be unnecessary—how could I warn you against following your heart, since I would know no better than to do the same, but now back in Berlin—be less considerate and take care of yourself. Let everything slide for a while, your mother’s meetings, your sister’s dances, your needlework, your aunt, and sleep, sleep! Only in sleep is one among benevolent spirits; too much wakefulness plagues you to death.” [Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice]

And now at twenty-three, I’m more alone than I’ve ever been. Drive-thru bags on the bed sheets, like absolution I can feed myself when standing at a stove feels like an act of God. I’ve felt forsaken for too long. I’m not even living anymore. What is the point if this is what love tastes like?

I cried over my tarot cards, asking what I’m doing wrong. I just want someone to love me. All it could give me was everything I already knew. You’re too afraid of love to receive it. I typed how to dismantle the wall into a search bar, and it said: I encountered an error doing what you asked. Could you try again? Even the god in my screen doesn't know how to undo me.

For fuck's sake, the repetition is the true punishment. I am so tired of hurting just to prove I'm here. I’ve been working for a whole year in solitude like I could build myself into something lovable again. And I made him, I swear on my life I made him whole. I see him in the mirror with a love so heavy it crushes the lungs. And I want to know why no one else can see him.

Tell me how it works then. They say a cut only closes if you let the room breathe into it until it stings itself quiet. They say it has to bleed before it cleans. So how do you step off the edge with no bridge to throw yourself from? How do you learn to drive in the dark without someone telling you which pedal means you’re going somewhere? How the actual fuck am I supposed to learn the shape of a hand holding mine that has never once been placed in my palm?

I’m furious about it. That no one ever knew how to handle me, and now there are entire walls so heavy even I can’t tear them down. I am all flattened ears, spitting blood in the brush, wild-eyed and mean. It’s pathetic, god, it’s humiliating, that this is what I become the moment someone looks at me with something like mercy.

I am so bitter. They love to preach what is meant for you will not miss you. Tell that to the empty room. Tell that to the walls. I have been missing my whole life.

I want to quit smoking. It’s making me sick. But living hand to mouth is how I’ve always survived. A hit of nicotine, a prayer, a muttered threat; screw the universe for giving me nothing to hold onto. It makes my chest buzz beside the wanting and the loneliness. Smoke is just a shape given to absence. If I rid myself of it, I am only an apostate standing in the open, starving for weight.

But I’m not full so much as congested with the waste of it. I panicked over the wildfire smoke, then went inside and dragged worse into my throat like a dark transfusion. I only care if I’m dying if I’m not the one doing it.

The bad thoughts stay faithful. Love never had that kind of spine. Some nights I sit in the dark and ask the wall what’s left. But I’m not waiting on my own rescue anymore. I did the heavy lifting. Look at me! I shoved the boulder up the hill! I became everything I said I would. And yet I am the body dragging itself out of the open soil, wiping the dirt off my mouth, and asking where everybody went.

What do I get in return? Just staring back at the trail littered with everything I’ve lost while the fog ahead glows pale with timid absolution; as if strength is a reward, as if I’m supposed to drop to my knees for it.

All I am is ache now from bones to soul. Look at that. I made it! Now I’m more alone than when I was bleeding, and nobody’s reaching out to hold a damn thing. You don't get to rest. You don't get to breathe. The world never intended for you to. That’s why it’s burning down around us.

lone pine poetry, I Made It (Now What?)