Amani Severson

Mid-July, The Nursing Home

Amani Severson

Cicada wings on the lawn, broken off and catching rain like spiderwebs. My great-grandmother sitting in the little fenced-off prairie, blessing stems: mountain mint, milkweed, switchgrass, switchgrass, kicking away the sour walnuts rotting at her feet. She dreamt again, she says, that I was eaten by a bear. I tell her about all the rain, about the trees down in Witch’s Hollow, about the frogs rioting in the streets. She wonders aloud how the farm is doing and whether her sister knows about the weather, though the farm has been gone for eleven years and her sister gone for four. I make a cowardly little hum and feign reflection. When I take her wrist all the veins jump away like guitar strings. “How's it been here?” I ask. “Not too bad?” “Eh,” she says. I watch her watch a window. Inside, there’s a man trying to bear the bite of cough syrup. Loose, hanging skin curtains ruptured eyes. “Eh?” I ask. She nods toward the man in the window. “Look at that,” she says. “Look. Life and its hangover.”

There’s a little piece of false light in Witch’s Hollow, a smear of glowing honey on the road that isn’t really there when you get close enough. Every time you see it you slow down, in case someone’s coming around the corner, golden headlights, but then you make the turn and you’re still alone. I feel a sort of shattering relief—we’re finally angry, finally inconsolable.

To 1961

Amani Severson

It was a year of false epiphanies, of cruelty and bitten fingers, of a vast and gaping anguish.

Eat the little things first, she said, just the little ones and we’ll save the big stuff for later.

Whatever, I said, whatever. I knew the metaphors and there was no use. Clementines, urchin shells—either one would break my jaw and all my failing teeth.

There were men and they followed me everywhere, men in Jaguars polishing revolvers below the dashboard, peeling secrets from apple-skin lips, beetle eyes and pocket knives, black suits and blue ties.

She took away my cigarettes and swallowed them all down, saying that’s enough, that’s enough of all of this.

Still there were ghosts in flagboys’ uniforms, bleeding into the bathroom mat.

She took me between coffee-stained hands, to the sanitorium, saying you’ve lost it, I love you but you’ve lost it.

This is the rifle we polish beside the fireplace, this is my body in the wrong lane, cocooned in fog, waiting for headlights to devour me. Eleven days in gray rooms, one-hundred and twenty volts.