A PLACE NOT AS TENDER

H Mars it is like a bird who never lands. She flies in a graceful arc downward but does not alight, instead she stretches back into the sky. I explain, imaginary numbers give us a way to describe where she would land if she did. It is complex, this blend of real and imagined. This idea of rest when one does not. I pretend to rest to put down, but I do not do forgiveness well. The product of the imaginary can yield something real. I hold onto this. ***

The water has receded in the ditches and the greenways. This a 48 hour reprieve a coastal haunt a getaway. You are sleeping and I am walking in the morning calm. The cattails are shedding and the pussy willows are starting to bud. Traveling the roadways because the tide is too high, I pause to shake the stone in my shoe to a place that is not as tender. ***

I have never not expected to bury you to write the obituary to identify the body. This belief fueled our wedding date, the births of our children, the way we weave forward. With the cancer I thought perhaps our roles might reverse, but they simply cut more away and declared me cured. No change to warp or weft. I wend onward. ***

I watch the dunlins, dozens of white bellies bright above the sand. They race in concert up and down following the rhythm of the waves, tiny beaks probing, heads bobbing in time. They trill and with a shuffling of wings take flight in perfect unison to land again a score of paces away. What is the collective noun for sandpipers? A Beauty? A Comfort? A Joy? ***

At New Years I am asked to list something to let go and something to attain. I am thirteen in my refusal. I will hold what I carry. The arbitrary turn of the year does not dictate what I reach for. I need no artificial urging to add to my load, I fill my plate well enough alone. I resent the empty gesture the tone-deaf call to join the chorus of resolutions. I am resolute, resolved, and unrestrained in my contempt. ***

Walking the beach accompanied by the waves, tide withdrawn, embraced by the shush and purr, it begins to rain. A gentle pap-pap-pap making circles on the wet sand. Not enough to raise my hood or close my coat, instead I tilt my head to feel the soft kisses on my face. They remind me I am loved. My children recognize my walk from a distance. The gait, the swing from the hip, the frame of my shoulders, the way I hold purpose in my stride. I am here to travel. I have places to go.

EXIT WOMB AFTER “HYDRANGEAS ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER LYS” BY EMILE CLAUS (1898)

Grace Lawrence

brown sugar trees canopied the river hydrangeas gleamed in the sunlight slivers under the wood-planked bridge the blood sipped on the stream waywardly fallopian tubes limp to the whims of the stream above a small voice what is that is she dying?—scurried creak. silence. ripples. exhal limp below the navel—its power seemingly diminished blood pooled around, staining the thighs without an exit wound— the reflection of the hydrangeas smeared in wine their colors seeping into one another as if bloomed through oil— the small voice silent but for the splashing of a clothed skin fighting through water the woman and womb suckling on the earth canopied by passersby

Who let the little boy in that water? That water is disgusting - get out! What is wrong with her? ruining the river… she lays there—untouched by time covered in beige leaves—kissed by a sun glow memorialized—cheeks of an infant’s first scream blush the river in a winding red, wisps of foliage and soft-spoken words echo shhh…. don’t wake it

Hydrangeas on the Banks of the River Lys emile claus

Oil Painting, 1898.