Foreword

What follows in Emily Adams-Aucoin’s “It Adheres to Many Things,” are a series of poems holy or broken, as in Leonard Cohen’s lines: “There’s a blaze of light in every word / it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy or the broken Hallelujah.” From the idea in the first poem that, “Not even a perfect thing plus a perfect thing equals happiness,” to the notion in her penultimate poem, “...Nothing / answered, which was a kind / of answering,” Adams-Aucoin guides us into her personal journey through lenses alternatively saintly and monstrous.

Within its brief beauty, It Adheres to Many Things speaks to the individuated language of self-reflection, creating from its whole a kind of hapax legomenon, a unique word within the context of itself. “I thought the world would be more beautiful / after I studied it,” she writes. “For a brief moment, / everything was alive, illuminated.” And indeed, Adams-Aucoin gives us this holy or broken (or both) world in its own tongue, a world illuminated and staring back at those who dare to look.

Gregory Stapp
2025

MELENCOLIA I

They were melancholy-textured hours. Our old dog was skin and bone,
    officially resigned. I had golden keys which unlocked nothing.

It wasn’t night, but there was a kind of persistent half-sleeping;
    my mind pushed against the bars of itself in a perfunctory way.

An angel mourned the world with me, which compounded
    the mourning—that the angel was there and that it could speak,

but that it wouldn’t speak to me, not even in a language
    I could learn with goodness or waiting. There’s a lack of purpose

in the sadness, a hole in that dark fabric through which I can see myself.
    Not even a perfect thing plus a perfect thing equals happiness.

To be winged and not flying, to have the tools and let them rust
    at your feet. What is that called, besides love of potential energy?

Don’t tell me. It must be true that someone watches, calculates, collects.
    To be an artist is to have your creation stare back into you with

the grotesque eyes you gave it.

THE MONSTROUS SOW OF LANDSER

Monster: the awful intersection of
other and fear. Once, I was a monster,
though it was never my official name.
When I read about the two-bodied pig,
I felt only pity, not wonder or
fear. I was too familiar to be scared.
Two heads is a sign from God. Two bodies
is the Earth burdening you because it
can. The pig lived one day, doubly shackled.
Not twice the stars, or twice the persimmons
on the trees, just all that blood rushing the
distance. I called my mother to tell her,
but she already knew. Imagine that,
she said, two bodies. But no, I couldn’t.
My single body was humming too loud.

THE RAVISHER

Of course Death would come to me
like a fucking man. To fight him off,
I had to use the hands that I loved with—
the exact same hands. I’d spent years walking
the perimeter of that placid lake, assuming it was safe
because it’d once been safe. Then, a man came to me
like Death. By then, I’d sacrificed so much
to the old gods of childhood. The years were fat,
docile animals in my lap. I was angry
when he touched me because I stupidly
thought I’d earned protection. I’d rounded
up for grocery store charities, held my outraged
tongue, and drank sparingly. But none of it mattered.
The world still thistled and thinned to transparency.
The air contained a sudden, strange electricity.
I used to be a materialist, which was almost enough.
Then he came for me.

THE ANGEL WITH THE KEY TO THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

As punishment for my crimes, I had to give up the bright world
and live below the threshold of good, which didn’t mean it was bad
necessarily, but that the constructs of good and bad couldn’t stretch
that far down without thinning beyond recognition. The angel
reminded me, but I already knew the deal—a thousand years
with only the company of my desire, which, in the pit, would sharpen
against the dark. The angel warned me with its deep voice: I would have to
press myself against the damp walls to keep it from cutting me. The doors
of my heart would close and then open and then close again.
When it was time for me to climb back out, the angel said, the world
would be different—in my absence, it would fall further into entropy,
dividing again and again against itself until there was no part of it
that wasn’t also in me, and no part of me that I couldn’t find in it.
Oh, what terrible homogeny! Before it pushed me in, the angel kissed me.
Yes, I know what I’m made for.

ST. JEROME IN HIS STUDY

How to be saved, except by the truth?
At this time of year, the trees don’t fruit.
The leaves grow to the size of a palm
and it doesn’t mean anything. For a decade,
I saw colored halos of light around people.
Someone told me it was a divine gift.
Someone else said it might be brain cancer.
One day, I woke up and it was gone,
and I grieved that strange sight terribly.
A library in my head had been incinerated.
And what, then, had my crime been to deserve
this long, colorless sentence? Once, I knew
what I was—it eddied around me, glittering.
The evidence cataloged itself by hue.
I thought the world would be more beautiful
after I studied it. For a brief moment,
everything was alive, illuminated.
And then everything dimmed.

THE ELEVATION OF SAINT MARY MAGDALEN

But one day, I woke to find it was like this:
winged babies at my feet, grabbing at me from beyond
the cold veil, hoisting me from underneath.

When they spoke, it was in a wordless language
like laughter. True that I could have fought harder,
could have refused their precious tyranny,

but they cooed so sweetly, and hooked their talons
into my sides. I took the job because it was asked of me.
No—I took it because I wanted to ask the job

about myself. Like any other job, it has its perks.
The sweetness of the hours, vacuous and syrupy.
Really, it’s more like the job took me.

THE WITCH

At the first signs of crow’s feet, I spend two hundred dollars
on serums with hyaluronic acid and retinol. My skin is always
wet and shining. Youth is an old god that demands sacrifice.
In the half-dark, I’m beautiful, but it’s such a slight beauty—
you have to tilt your head. I use light and angle strategically.
I forget what I really look like so that when I accidentally
see my reflection, I scream, as if I’m an intruder
in my own home. I think:
if there were no mirrors, I might be able to convince myself.
Then the mirrors screw themselves further into the walls.
Every night, I dream of flying backwards on a black goat
who’s singing. My crow’s feet grow bodies,
and then beaks, and then wings.

VIRGIN WITH HAIRBAND ON A CRESCENT MOON

Below us
is the sleeping world,
which I look upon
from our thin moon
like a jealous God.
Everywhere I look,
I find the absence
of myself. I do the dishes,
fold laundry, confront
oblivion. Even the birds
are quiet at midnight,
as quiet as my heart.
In the dark, we become
animals again. We speak
without speaking,
sing without music.
Everything that makes us
human falls away
like a delicate husk.
The night used to be
mine to spread out in
as I wished, and now
this reconfiguring.
The hours go by
like icy centuries.
Sometimes
in my dreams, I sleep.

AGONY IN THE GARDEN

I went to the garden to pray in my
awful way. It sounded like begging
because it was begging. The silence
filled the spaces like agonizing
music so that I couldn't hear
what the instructions were—
I couldn’t even imagine
what they might have been.

I said, If I must finally forget myself,
and If I must stay in the world
and bend myself and not it, fine.
But my hands trembled. The quiet
crescendoed not in volume
but in meaning. All around me,
the leaves shook with silent,
self-assured laughter. Nothing
answered, which was a kind
of answering.

MADONNA WITH THE PEAR

Those months were pools of thick mud I waded through.
I could’ve been sleeping, but I wasn’t. None of the relief
from leaving the dream. With one arm, I carried my daughter,
my legacy of how I eventually decided to love the world.
With the other, a ripe, yellow-green pear heavy for its size.
I was leaving, then, which explained the resistance. Leaning
against the knotted flesh of a leafless tree, I knew I was lucky,
even as the mud eveloped my ankles, fed with icy water
from the nearby sea. It was winter, and I still had
sweetness. My daughter cooed to me in our language.
I took a large bite of the pear, and the juice dripped down
my chin. Mud rose to my ankles, then my shins. Believe it
or not, that was higher ground. There was nowhere else
to climb to. We were lost in the wet and dark of December.
We had to wait there for the light.

Acknowledgements

"Melencolia I", Shō Poetry Journal Issue Seven (June 2025)
"Madonna with the Pear”, The Columbia Review (Spring 2025)

IT ADHERES TO MANY THINGS
Copyright © 2025 EMILY ADAMS-AUCOIN
Cover art by Diana Baltag, "Untitled", 2020.
Cover and interior design by Diana Baltag
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or republished without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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