No Fear
She found herself on the other side of the country — drove in a fugue as far west as she could until she hit the ocean.
As she drove away from the eastern ocean on the other extreme of the country — away from her husband, a husband who never was but insisted on the name and the discipline he forced; away from the son she never really wanted but the “husband-man” insisted on — she felt no bindings stretching taut, no heaviness.
No fear.
She had her passport, soon she’d have to choose: north to a clean well lighted place or south to the land of her ancestors — anywhere but this moribund, splintering, ghost ship crawling with mites and weighted down by a gargantuan millstone.
Staring at the sea, she spoke this into her phone:
I long to shape
a moon from bone.
I heard that before,
somewhere—
it resonated. A chord
struck—atonal
& dissonant.
A wound—a pickaxe stymie,
a hurricane hole
in homogeneity.
Monosyllabic—
trickle & tone.
“Where
you going—where
you been?”
I’ll find a planetarium
to bathe in—
nothing more
to say.
She threw the phone into the Pacific, walked back to car, and drove…
What I’m Reading:
Sometimes she imagines it will happen this way / that it has happened already,
and she stands remembering / that it is happening now, in the dawn of her
imagining—her body a wisp of air in a drafty corridor, stirred in the wake of
her passing.
— Jennifer Maier / “The Occupant Revisits the Rooms of Her Life and Arrives at a Late Understanding”
