No one really knows where to begin — the story, the song,
the first kiss. But like taking a walk, you just
start where you’re standing. One hand, you
lay your cards on the table. Queens and kings, messengers…
cups and swords. You drink, you are sliced and spun. The Fool —
tipping over an edge where the ground may or may not rise to meet you.
All of us orphans of a sort, from one couch to another waking,
falling from one minute to another, a family patched together
from the odds and ends of broken things — mothers,
fathers, sisters and brothers (that’s just how things are now)
with cut-up feet, burning down the streets.
In a northern city you cleaned my nails with the edge
of a milk carton on the train, the drumroll of languages keeps time —
skyline recedes, the gray Hudson below, a single ferry trailing froth…
through the stations on the J line, I remember Canal Street, I
read it in a book. Krasavica, you say,
and I was afraid of the place where the tracks end.
Yeah, you might run into T — there, she says. He might
beg you for change (laughing). He sleeps in a folding chair.
And this is the one she turns to when things go bad, her Voice
of Reason. He wants to make a new life. Go to the clinic.
“And this is the guy I took to the prom.” He wants
to come to her. She downs another glass of wine.
“I don’t think so.”
We look out from her rooftop, over the permanent haze, the
smoggy jungle breath of monsters.
Our animal sons climb the rails, laugh.
How can you tell them there are no monsters?
I wish there were no monsters.
Seeing you again…how little had changed, how looking
at you felt the same. I really believed you never thought twice
about it… and then like some angel or fiend speaking through you
you said, you said…well, I will never forget it.
She holds her hands flat over mine.
You hold your hands flat over mine.
She’s getting a ragged-hearted tattoo, something patchy and
pink — something, of course, with wings.
She’s handing me the black-and-whites of what was lost, him, him;
He took a gun and blew out the color.
It’s a pinprick nagging that sits on your stomach, something
with a bad taste that won’t go down and won’t come up.
Tell me your worst moment, one of them. Something not too
personal. The lights are out. No, it was morning, and it’s all
personal. In words it sounds worse than I ever thought it would,
makes me wish it wasn’t true or I hadn’t chosen that story. Where
are my sunglasses now?
“It’s ok.”
It’s not ok.
But every frame is the place where you begin, and the place
where something ends
and it leaves me wondering…
“Just ten minutes more,” you say, sleepy.
The blinds make ribbons of your beautiful face.
But I am still Alice, falling and bouncing off the walls, trying to
grab onto something.
“Ok, then. Just ten more minutes.”
***
Abigail Swire writes fiction and non-fiction. She served time as a journalist, mad scientist, and assembly line worker, among other things. Abigail has published articles and short stories for various media. She is currently working on her first novel, The Factory.
Rejection Letters 