ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: THE WHOLE RIDE BACK Martha Hunter, Master of Fine Arts, 2017 Thesis Directed by: Professor Elizabeth Arnold, Department of English The Whole Ride Back is a collection of poems that traces the effect of transient familial relationships on the speaker’s isolation and detachment. These poems utilize the natural landscape of the Southeastern United States, among other places, and employ a constant navigation between moderation and associative release of information, demonstrated through varying line length and stanza structure throughout. The speaker draws on family myth- making, dreams, and an ever-unattainable other to discuss the ways in which memory and habit affect the self’s capacity for attachment. THE WHOLE RIDE BACK by Martha Hunter Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts 2017 Advisory Committee: Professor Elizabeth Arnold, Chair Professor Michael Collier Professor Stanley Plumly Professor Joshua Weiner © Copyright by Martha Hunter 2017 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Bellows ................................................................................................................................1 I Prairie Dogs .........................................................................................................................3 Pietà......................................................................................................................................5 East of the Hudson ...............................................................................................................6 Scenes for Aunt Linda, Who Died in July ...........................................................................8 Suburban Pastoral ..............................................................................................................10 Radius ................................................................................................................................11 Diminishing Distance.........................................................................................................13 At the Tennessee Cracker Barrel .......................................................................................14 On the Train, Headed Elsewhere .......................................................................................15 II The Whole Ride Back ........................................................................................................17 Memorial in Winter............................................................................................................18 In Lieu of Knives ...............................................................................................................20 Jerónimos Monastery .........................................................................................................21 Hanukkah Lights ................................................................................................................22 Outlines ..............................................................................................................................24 Saturn Devouring ...............................................................................................................26 Sky .....................................................................................................................................27 III Elegy in Which I Still Think of You ..................................................................................29 Poem ..................................................................................................................................30 Macrobiotic ........................................................................................................................32 Two Weeks in Prague ........................................................................................................33 At the YWCA ....................................................................................................................35 Near a Barn Upstate ...........................................................................................................36 Handfuls .............................................................................................................................37 * What it Looked Like ..........................................................................................................41 1 Bellows A barge determines which side of the river we own—we acquaintances in brightly-colored kayaks, veering to the shore to determine the names of the grasses. Fickle river, flinging trout into nightfall, indifferent to the stories I tell. The evening is sluggish, and our four-mile stretch of river holds us. I paddle near a woman who speaks of the city as an animal, fed well in my absence. What it means to be back here: a tree doubled over remembering wind. 2 I 3 Prairie Dogs Today I’ve been thinking of Castle Rock where one hundred prairie dogs were carried from a woman’s home and carted off in silver tubs, the whole time the woman pleading to the camera, saying she wants to keep them safe, aware that soon, they would be fed to the black-footed ferrets, who are endangered. In Denver it seemed like I was always trying to talk about the prairie dogs again. When my sister drove me from the airport the day I moved into her house, she brought them up. We were passing the corrugated cloud art off Peña Boulevard, the Rockies swaddled in dust, the whole time Karen dusting off gossip the way she says everything: like fact—that cattle were breaking their legs in the holes and so they had to build a vacuum big enough to hold all the prairie dogs. I used to run in Wash Park before it got too cold—before I gave up on my loose-fitting kneecaps. I did the 3.25 miles around the lake in the dark, laughing to myself about how everyone else was too afraid but not me and then Karen, always Karen, came in with a story about her co-worker who got in a fight with her boyfriend, the two of them drunk after some kind of holiday party arguing about their future the way everyone does, and anyway, this guy, he stepped out of the house without his phone and went to drink more down the street, near the shops on South Gaylord or somewhere else, and she didn’t worry about where he’d gone until he wasn’t there in the morning and then they found him dead in the lake and maybe he was just drunk but maybe… maybe not. She got the message across. That year, I followed Karen around and met her friends, drinking bubbling drinks on patios with most of my Sundays, or otherwise offering to watch the baby when she and Chad would go out on a date. I remember we would eat pastries on Saturdays. Karen would stay at home and make eggs while I rode my bike to fetch doughnuts. It comes to me now 4 that I cultivated a loneliness that year that I can’t quite access from anywhere else. I imagine it had something to do with carrying on the talk a little longer than anyone intended— telling stories at the table when I knew no one else was listening. For a week once, I got tired and stopped spilling about meetings at work or the two blind people on the bus who I noticed were flirting. I would leave the quiet at the table and step out to walk in the park with February burning a hole in my cheeks. It was out of that week that I began to realize, as I inched past the rows of sunflowers which were, like the ones Karen had planted, crumpled and soggy from frost, that the way I filled the house with my voice the whole time had been a matter of hopeful kindness—of switching on a radio in the morning and refusing ever to turn it off. 5 Pietà After taking the plant outside to freeze, I learn too late about fruit dots: little egg-looking things on the palm of a bear-paw fern. And last night, the Allegheny stonecrop’s stem snapped off—I covered the flowering end shallow and rootless in the dirt. Allegheny Live-For-Ever, gardeners call it: resilient succulent on my west-facing ledge. Too late in the year, it wants to live. It wants to live if I let it, and that’s the question: whether to watch something thrive in front of me. Around the house, spider plants and miscellany ferns droop down. They curl their spiny fronds around the pots. Discolored, bare, they hold themselves. In the unembarrassed dark, they carry their fracturing roots. 6 East of the Hudson I can almost hear the heartbeat of this building as it moves in the wind. Outside my office window, streetlights stutter on before dark, and near the windows next to me, pigeons cooing into pockets of dusk. It’s cold tonight, and I think of Susan in New York, hope she has walls around her. That night at the shelter, they found her in the bathroom with the lights off, speaking prayers into her arm with a needle. She said quiet was sounding better in the dark those days—when she had questions, there was always the flat answer of walls painted over, the bubbling smell of epoxy, urine. Now, under the streetlamp on the darkening sidewalk, a pigeon picks through vomit as though pointing to tea leaves—quiet as I trace the lines of her hands as I remember them, seeing nothing but the time of day. What always reminds me is the sound of doors closing softly in the hall, how they did when we were children pretending to sleep, the fingers of willows brushing the fragile glass 7 windows, glass thin as eyelids. I watched her nod off on a train once, heard her words as they left the car, the click of a railroad switch east of the Hudson. I smelled smoke and rain: wondered which I’d imagined. 8 Scenes for Aunt Linda, Who Died in July Settling in lopsided across the valley, the fog, like foil over bowls of sauce, the fog— bear with me—is dilating. I am finding it hard to move. I am sinking, eating chips on the couch, and I’m sorry that this is how it feels to be here. * Bear with me for swearing at the stoplight which is red each morning. For the small poisoned mouse, which propped its body along the wall and limped. I let a coworker knock him into the dustbin and then the trash. * I flagged an email from you regarding next year’s reunion: Let me know what I can do, except clopp you over the head! Some inside joke I’m still sweeping for online. * But the doe and fawn’s parade on the frosted flat. Look! Their tails drift like ghosts across the grass, the field herded by mountains and a creek and four men fishing in a tin can boat. * We watched your funeral from my laptop in Georgia. Someone’s girlfriend’s phone in the top pews. Brutal ceilings. Only Boston accents could weather the echoes. I tried translating a story for Grandma Jody: something about cards…he’s talking about the cards she sent for every birthday. 9 Remember that? On the way out, a distant uncle asked to split a doughnut. * When someone took too long choosing the bread: chop chop! Always a dinner or dance to make. Or the wedding photo where you took over, bossed us around until we made something of ourselves— a straight line, maybe. * They slicked your hair back for the wake, Suzie said. You didn’t look like you. Despite facts, I didn’t think you would go at all. This morning, a pair of underwear stuck in the leg of my pants. Pushed out by a toe, the thing uncoiled and bloomed. 10 Suburban Pastoral From under the sun of a street lamp, a mimic of starlings thickens. Another night, and the raccoon’s back at it: scratching up a mattress at the road. This time of year, the dark arrives too early. The mountains seem to be laughing, saying something about melting snow or rivers pulled along by the wings of mayflies. Down the street, a mutt steals after a rabbit until his leash seizes up. Stolen from his work of hunting, he uncloaks a whine. And this is the time I wanted: time to think the same thoughts over. In the back of a passing truck, a deer’s hind legs tied together point to the night like blades. 11 Radius All morning, the dogwoods fell wet to the gutters and browned. Braless on the porch, we assembled a snack from our salvaged bowl of apple cores and a box of salt. A woman’s coughing fit next-door landed blood on the hedges. Everyone on the block was drunk and tensing for the rain to break. It did, so we ran for wine and paused where two cats stood at the storefront, pawing a bird’s wing plastered to the pavement. Back home, the woman who was sick had gone, her chair empty under the wilted lines. Lorenzo was out in the street again, mixing bug bombs on the double yellow. That last week in the house, the maggots I hadn’t killed turned to flies and flew to the windows for refuge. The blinds vibrating, we sat on the carpet, one of us every few minutes slamming a palm against the slats to watch the fat insects fall dead onto the sills. Even now, I miss our slovenly past as I walk 12 beside her yard mistakenly. Old friend—her new home next to my new home, I’d forgotten— I check the phone for nothing, turn my sight to a mouthful of asters across the street. A walked dog ahead pulls along, leash stretching until it spans the rest of what I see. I follow its lead. 13 Diminishing Distance The bus down to you is pit stops: only pit stops with the smoking passengers making plans by now, quick friends. The closing sub shops smell of urine or pepperoncini – no difference so late an hour. And the bus of body parts sprawling into empty seats. A man’s knee sidles into my ribs at 3 am and I sleep around it. Then in the dark technicality of morning, the bones of a burning van. Under the Conoco overhang in Bristol, a man on the phone speaks with his hands. Listen: it’s not that serious. To me, you are the southern Virginia hillside. A clearing of chrysanthemum, ironweed, etc. A bird empties itself over the river and I watch the string of waste parasail beside me. Nothing we do will change a thing. Loneliness consolidated is just loneliness. 14 At the Tennessee Cracker Barrel our waitress knows we’re awful we eat pale biscuits a woman breathes from a tank her nephew cuts the bacon there is no smoking the walls ugly fences with decorations last night I touched your hair your wrists smelled like bourbon we walked around the church yard : chipped stone buried hedges joggers going by their heavy breath the roots starting to wake turn over stroke the dirt this used to be my city too I’m here to visit other people before they move away we’re going to the canyon after breakfast our waitress avoids us side-eyes your nails I forgot I painted them you rest your hands on the table and laugh always so loud the last time I saw the canyon some siblings got their dog stoned their shoulders molting taking flight when the rain came the rocks blackened the brothers stashed themselves in the maples that dog whimpering it sounded like wind everyone out of sight but me folding a towel shoes sodden begging the ridge to claim me 15 On the Train, Headed Elsewhere In the shuttering light of whatever suburb, I can see from my seat the next car over, a wan reflection of this one. A man sits with his back to me. It’s not clear which side of the glass he’s on, but his shoulders slump and I think he’s keeping a secret, making his body smaller for penance, though maybe it’s this song I can’t put down. In it, they’re drunk in the kitchen. He and a woman woolgathering about islands, later discarding shirts, crushing pills into purple dust. Then every minute, the predictable coo: Pardon my behavior, I’ll apologize later. Say sorry later. My body fades newly into focus. Everyone’s got beautiful skin today, thin and worn, like overripe pears. I want to touch a shoulder, the underbelly of some strange ear. These old habits of mine persisting: looking people up, finding them after years of nothing. The one I called Red Glasses I found last night. My memory of our swim on the barely-flooded lawn lingering from summer in Pennsylvania, the month I stopped answering calls, wanting permission to change, not knowing how to ask. 16 II 17 The Whole Ride Back there is a woman asleep on my shoulder I count pennies notice the trees changing the tulip poplars gone replaced with ridiculous grasses I couldn’t tell you the specifics the bus you said would be cold along the way I learn the drivers can’t change the temperature it’s set by engineers who study chilliness by some equation let’s face it I know nothing about math or trees until something reminds me of home like the poplars their t-shaped leaves above our camp I know them when I see them you hear people saying this all the time in relation to porn or significant others I can’t get last night out of my head you dug all the rocks out from under our tent it felt to me like the opposite of burial 18 Memorial in Winter The trouble with navigating city parks is clear to me now, I think, as we’re driving along in Rock Creek Park, my grandma and father, his wife and I in the back seat debating whether to eat a candy bar set down in a bowl of quarters—their toll money—the debate settled when I set down the wrapper, find my fingers coated in clear caramel film and now too, specks of Kleenex, and I tune in to my grandma rubbing the arthritic knobs on her fingers as she’s telling the story of Chandra Levy, her skeleton found somewhere near this road, my dad also asking which way now and though I am still checking the phone, I say keep going for three quarters of a mile and what do you know, I was right, but my grandma has moved on to tell the story of more disappearances and women found dead in outdoor spaces as though there’s a whole catalogue she’s browsing through in the front—pictures of women whose lives have “gone terribly wrong,” and I remember now the story my dad was telling at lunch about the girl at the county jail up in New York, who tells my sister, who has just started to read in her cell, to breathe and meditate—to forget the bad meat at lunch and the ugly walls—but he tells me that this woman was out on the Hudson with just her fiancé, drinking beers and kayaking, a romantic trip away some weekend in the spring, and that while on the water, his boat capsized and he drowned or froze to death while the tide shrank him away to the size of a thumb from the woman whose English is shaky, who later was questioned for twelve hours, her English used against her until she admitted to accidentally pulling his drain plug earlier on the shore, the New York Post calling her ‘Kayak Killer,’ the woman who does yoga for hours in jail and tells my sister to let it go, whatever doesn’t serve her, which seems like a lot to let go all at once, but I hear that Susan is doing better than when I visited her in White Plains, the thought of her huddled over a pile of substanceless yogurts in her room or nodding out on the train to Manhattan too much for me now, but my dad did say she is doing better and actually he is telling me something else—he says we are lost, that I need to tell him where to go before he has gone the other way, and so I focus 19 and tell him that now we get a detour, going across the bridge between us and Roosevelt Island, where we can see the tops of the Rosslyn buildings between all the branches, I say to everyone so that they will know I know my way around, though I don’t, really, which is why we are taking this U-turn across a bridge and back to find street parking in the first place, but everything is easy enough, and so when we park, my grandma takes someone’s arm while I walk quickly ahead, having never seen this particular monument, except once in a scene on TV where one political guy bribed another political guy and it was spring with the cherry blossoms all around, which is why I can tell my grandma that these are cherry trees so she thinks that I know something more than I do as she takes my picture next to a bronze FDR in his wheelchair, his shoulder rubbed shiny by tourists like us who put their arms around him in love, but more with the past than anything else, and as I take her picture now, cozied up sweetly to Franklin Delano, my grandma recalls walking through his home in Hyde Park just days before, the coincidence nothing but a delight for presidents, and soon, we’re walking through a series of patina and stone walls and Eleanor standing rusty in an alcove, my grandma trying to see her through the glare of the sun, her hand on her brow in a straining kind of solute, and right before the final piece of the monument where FDR sits gigantic in his cape next to Fala, we stop at a bench so she can rest her hips and my dad’s wife can call her aging relatives in New York, and before I can sit down, my grandma asks me to take her a picture of the Washington Monument, which I call the washington phallus in a swift return to angst, and I say yes and take her camera by the water and zoom in to the statue and can’t stop remembering the woman’s deflated kayak and can’t stop picturing her in my sister’s cell, which I take to look like a cell from a movie, and so I focus and remember clearly—before her pinned-out mugshot—my sister gently trying to save her own life, telling me ten years ago outside a Ruby Tuesday’s in New York, that she had just read half of a book and that she liked it a little more than she was expecting. 20 In Lieu of Knives The Aztec priests knew how to grab a heart like no one else, careening their faithful fingers through an abdominal slit and up the ribcage, brushing sinew up and down, and like that: the heart in hand. At the exhibit, a jar of sickly white feet stare buoyantly through the glass. We’re finding new ways to preserve in the wet specimens collection— to remember that there is always ritual suspended inside the body, turning and rising to the top. We learn on one of the placards that an ancient civilization would soak their dead in rivers, drag them out after a week and use their hands instead of knives to seize open flesh—perform an autopsy that pleased the gods. It seems that getting inside things has its own set of prayers. My friend told me once about dissecting an old woman for class— how she made a cut in the skin and used her fingers to pull away sheets of it and then opened her up to decipher the private hiss of tumors. A shelf of Shuar tsantsa shrunken heads stare into themselves: ashen eyelids and lips stitched shut to hold in spirits. This morning in our hotel room, the window wouldn’t budge and so, sealed in, we packed our clothes on the bed and breathed. 21 Jerónimos Monastery You said Jesus had nice abs, and I walked away again. In the stained glass of the imagination, Jerome proofreads our prayers and builds card catalogues for the different ways to feel alone. The procession dolls were carved empty and stuffed with shadow. When night pressed its weight on us, the afternoon inside me fell asleep. You and I went down to the street after dinner and listened to the city remembering itself, listened to the song of neutrality in the war, of the evacuees sitting on benches, playing cards and waiting for the world to crack open. In the monastery, I listened to Jerome dying alone in the desert, mistranslating his death all the while. Jerome changed witchcraft to observing dreams, as though for him, they were the same. Last night, I dreamed that many lives were crawling over me. You woke me filling a glass of water and stood at the window in our room. 22 Hanukkah Lights I sat on my hands in the freezing car, my left eye blinking twice to mark each house we passed. One of the houses was dark. In its yard, brown ferns lay buckled in the snow. We slowed down and I didn’t blink. “This was my family’s house,” my father said, and turned back to the radio. We’d been there once, but I hadn’t remembered and didn’t want to pry. Even now, he shares the valley with me as though reading aloud a book: fast facts about vultures detecting gas leaks and goldenrod asphyxiating the fields. Here, box turtles dig themselves into mud for winter, and cattails bow at the road as if they’re listening. The way I see it, a mallard’s feather settles 23 in the dirt. A boy scrapes his knee in the distance and calls for his brother to turn. 24 Outlines Typical, the tornado warning stirred us from sleep, the cat busy taking care of our worry by pacing in front of the windows then climbing down to chew on my fingers. We lay in the bed on our separate sides. Not speaking to you, I traced the mountain’s outline with my hand, my eyes half open and apathetic. In the dream I’d been having, my sister died driving, and though we sat waiting for news, it wasn’t a call that told us but a picture I found in the paper where a tombstone, like an afterthought, was placed tilted at the corner of a building. On the grass was my niece, two and cloudy-haired, staring into the camera, her hand holding the boyfriend’s hand, her arm up high. The next dream was another wreck, and then the weather outside, the fires that have picked up this week. Each night, we watch videos of thin escapes: 25 glinting skies and orange embankments, the softened tarmac always folding under tree fall. In one clip, ashes drift like leaves in a burning sky as a dog pants off-screen, a man’s voice lilting it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. When my sister was struck by lightning, it smashed her mouth into a rock. It detached her retinas. This was years ago in the woods in South Carolina where the doctor at the hospital said God chooses who he strikes down like it was a prescription. When she came home, her lip stitched up and her world approximated in silhouettes, I refused to clean out the fridge. She ate moldy cheese two different times because she couldn’t see it, so she’d scream in my face. I’d turn quiet with fake politeness the way you never would. The way you save your love with anger—to hold the moment before it rips apart the sky. 26 Saturn Devouring In the room, you’re holding my bones and a picture of how they should be. The instructions are in the wrong language and you’re trying to learn but I’m crying in another alphabet that you don’t love me enough. I see your thumbnails splitting like pages but in the other room my hands are rooting around in the fridge. My heart— my hands will find it—smells good to them. And your heart. Remember when I was the bones of a jackal? That time with your teeth, you dug to let me out. 27 Sky Was the sky darker than it was that night in October I left you in the dark the sky clouding around us like ink like in your dreams there are no mountains that don’t force you to tears but your tears force the mountains into being it being a dream when I left you out in the city it was new then the fog collecting around our feet before rising covering us completely you said you were mine completely completely what is completely even the wind left something behind there were so many moments that shove you awake even now you hit the floor and see light you wish it away wish the mountains back under your feet wish my hand from your chest I watch your chest rise watch you pause between breaths and for seconds you aren’t breathing but thinking of something. I remember walking the other way that night in October I saw two people in an alley next to a dumpster. They were standing up, fucking, her hand sliding down the chipped green metal, their shadows on the brick like beasts, backs arched and swearing at the moon, I kept going. Where do you go when you go there looking at the window your chest still risen and waiting to fall to remember the direction of breath to recall again how in your dream we were lost we couldn’t find the constellations above us our heads drooping under the sky the sky stirring above us each morning you wake as a child those first few minutes holding your breath I am holding you I feel your chest fall your eyes onto mine the moon of your eyes falling over me. 28 III 29 Elegy In Which I Still Think Of You If I can believe in stillness, I can stay in this bed all day, without apology or hope for better. Against the slats of the headboard, I can wilt my neck to the half-drawn shades and hear the cardinal trumpeting to a mid-morning gray. Winter bird who hates me: find another space to bore. From this bed, I can visit again the ferns splintering through the bowed straps of the house. The time you showed me first, I followed you scrambling up the hillside near crawdads clicking in the mud. We were at your parents’ house and your mother wanted cobbler. We didn’t know it was an act of burial. I found stones and pressed them into your wrists. Under the roof, we borrowed history… a parlor, a picture. The shrub of blackberries came next. We picked what we could carry and beetled down the hill. What struck us was what a neighbor hung while we were gone. From a branch, a string, and from that, a crow, dangling by a leg, its wings falling slack, the oiled feathers pointing blame to the ground for not reaching up to hide it. Your father said it was an effigy, a warning to preserve the crops. I’ve since learned the nature of warning: how borderless it is and was then, calling for me, at least, to wake. It’s true— I should have woken up by now. Should have left you looking out the glassless window before the horses trotted years into the dirt. 30 Poem 1. After Ovid First, we were there together in the crystalline air. The clouds (we were the clouds) gathered themselves into a mound. Sure, the breeze blew in and freed us— we walked in separate directions down the street and wiped each other off like crumbs. 2. In Monteverde A vision of my mother in the passenger seat— around us, hiss of a rainforest like punctured tires. Her hand clutched her other hand, fingers conducting a granulated silence. In the other seat, my father, driving with his eyes fixed on a kestrel’s plunge. 31 And the rock face below. I’ll never forget— his grin, feverish above the steering wheel. My mother’s mind never leaving the road. 32 Macrobiotic When they met my mom and dad had kids and divorces and all of that and I didn’t exist and still I have to hear these stories I heard my dad ate so fast once when he came over to meet my sisters they got 1 bite in but he was done looked up to two girls and my mom just staring and all I can imagine is that the meal was part of my mom’s macrobiotic kick so miso and greens and tofu and maybe a sprouted something or other my sister Karen told me she was 11 when she first tried soda she used to hide behind doors and eat government cheese and before I was born they were latch-key kids she once told me that Naomi ate butter straight from the stick the two of them hiding their wrappers in the trash under a pile of old brown rice while a note on the table said beans in the fridge and on the door to their apartment in Nyack, NY someone wrote whitey in stark white paint but their apartment was mostly nice and when it wasn’t my mom would make veggie dogs and sauerkraut and sneak them in with kimchi to the movies where other people would wave their hands at the smell and things were hard I heard like when my mom fell asleep in her exam she worked 40 hrs a week was a single parent went to school to teach the blind and visually impaired she went to class in the city and had to walk around with a blindfold for 1 whole day which is not that crazy she will tell me because some people are blind their whole lives and do just fine and I believe her but still I hate it hearing these stories about the world when the world was more difficult to navigate when people I know had nothing they had so little it wouldn’t even fill up the tiniest room and the rooms really were tiny so small their shoulders all crowded together and me unborn irrelevant except many years later when we all had so much you could choke on it. 33 Two Weeks in Prague On the way, I convince you to stop so I can order a cone of coconut and then walk with you across the Vltava. Everywhere on the bridge are little boys in backpacks and hats with ears, 100 little mammals marching toward Old City. Parts of the pass are under repair and unwalkable, the dirt-red bricks soon to be evicted for new ones. I catch an angle of what I think is the base of the rocky hill where I considered a series of statues: a man disintegrating up a stairway, each version of his body more fragmented than the one below it. In the last, he is barely a pair of legs. There are thickets of history in this city, yet I’ve spent all of today apologizing. Fair enough. Last night, we dropped our luggage at the hostel and walked to a restaurant where the menu came. I took up minutes memorizing the words for garlic soup, sipping my beer and ignoring you to feel the language in my mouth: 34 česneková polévka, chess-nay-ko-va poh-leff-ka. The soup was a delicious beige and tasted like a country we didn’t know. We sat like this for an hour, the country on the table between us. Across the bridge, there is more wind than I know how to hold. This is a cold summer month, more like April they say. You walk ahead of me, and that’s okay— we’re different people pretending otherwise. On the banks of the river, a tram stammers and I watch a group of swans offer their violence plainly to another. A noiseless rush, the female’s head shifting underwater. Around her, a frenzy of eight greedy wings nudging the air aside. 35 At the YWCA Kicked up in Pennsylvania, the fog turns slowly off the exit ramps and across fields of black lambs who rub their backs in rotten birds and clodded brown grass— acres of it. There’s a chill this afternoon, and the radio static is stretching thin, uncovering a preacher’s barking sermon as I near the covered bridge and the river under it. I’m taking the scenic way home this time, mostly to avoid the tolls, but also because I think this will be the last of it. Jones Beach was too crowded this week. There’s sand in the car mat, my head still buzzing from the boardwalk speakers and fights breaking out across the shore. Under our red umbrella, I watched my sister napping off pills, swatting flies from her eyelids. The water was warm skin, dreaming its way up her veins and shoulders and neck as we bobbed in the waves. When I dropped her off at the shelter, I stared at a pile of steel wool left on the concrete and shook her hand—the way I would shut a gate. I heard the radio leak out from the car windows then, heard static still and timeless, just as I keep it now, car radio un-tuned, sermon and samba overlapping, all of it fading out into an irksome, borderless noise which pulls me back. Back towards the tower off 81 and then up again to New York. 36 Near a Barn Upstate The first egg on gravel was enough against the silence. The sky looked like a lit-up fridge, the sprinklers starting on my friend’s front lawn. I threw the second one down, afraid of what had broken in the air. Through the web of shell, the sludge flooded from the egg. What was left was the body grown into it, made by a rooster and abandoned in the warm cavity of hen. We threw each egg one at a time until the ground was covered in stiff gray bodies and bits of shell. In home economics the year before, we had all adopted a hollowed egg-baby to call our own. Three times, I dropped mine and forged another, hacking holes in the ends and placing my mouth at the top of the eggs, blowing out the insides to circle the drain. I think of my nephew: the happy baby who calls me bug. Who each time I carry down the stairs, grips my sweater. Reflex, I know, but still I feel a fear so big it rips my chest, remembering how quickly we uncovered the chicks. How we heard, in the plastic bucket below, a thud so new it was cruel. 37 Handfuls 1 The wildflowers in Death Valley are not fucking around. They keep the rain for themselves, sharpen their roots in the dirt. I am looking up aperture on my phone. I am kicking a rock out of my way, but there are more. Nearby, 200 miles of salt pisses me off. The air smells like jackrabbits, and everything else it smells like. Last night, I dreamed you handed me a bowl of water and woke up wanting to give it back. No matter. We haven’t spoken now in months, and a nearby sign tells me that just a few handfuls of seeds plants an acre of paintbrush. 2 Used to, I was your dog. I loved visiting you in Arizona— that coiled-up desert. You left me alone to read your books. There were always enough 38 to choose from. When you returned, I interrupted you shyly as a way of survival. 3 More toothsome now is this wind, bellowing across moonless tar. Driving on 395, I flash my lights at the mule deer who stand by the road’s edge, dense and placid as though they might tip over. I see five dead masses heavy in the highway margin and then the gale comes in and topples my count. Together, we were restless, remember? always busy knowing too much about the other’s body. The ground is creaking apart, I think. Just one hour away from my destination, though the hour stays hidden under sand, breathing through a straw. 4 And the time we found a bird hanging from a neighbor’s tree, the string tied to its ankle: I’ve latched it to you, impossibly tangled. 39 Same with the fireflies— not my memory but yours. If I Google my name, your picture shows up first. Let me be clear: this should be an ode to my own boiling blood. 40 * 41 What it Looked Like Trees, different kinds with oblong leaves and greenish fingers pointing in too many directions. And dirt, or dust, with sweat streaked up everyone’s thorn-tattered calves. Sinewy forest, the only way down to Big Wave Beach. A couple in front of me with a map to sweat over leads the way. He hands her water—she drinks it. Some paradise: nothing but spiders bigger than my head, one posing in the armpit of an overhead oak. A careful hungry thing with yellow moons orbiting her joints, her hourglass frame. From the beach, the din of it, comes a laugh-track to our arrival. Not yet. Too-blue, the sky stays up there: a reminder of everything else I want to tell you.