Cleveland, and surrounds

Sarabeth Domal

1. on the balls of your feet as to not creak the floorboards. your keys from the table, cradle them in your hand as to not echo, the cold. Slam and I do mean slam the screen door, fracture the plastic, retribute, wake up Detroit Shoreway.

to Huntington Beach then. Eyes straight ahead, in through your nose, out through your mouth, glacier air reaching the pinnacle of my lungs, northern wind from your approach and dissolve seeing to the outermost layer of my visage, threatening to leave a thing behind. I don’t like to talk while running.

2. Anna almost misses the right turn into the parking lot through no fault of her own, I should have been navigating but I was thinking about how this road would lead me directly to Hilliard. I read about Hilliard recently, in a book about the American opioid crisis. There was an anecdote about a young mother who overdosed in the parking lot of a supermarket next to the chicken shop we used to eat at, as a treat. It was alarming, but also a friendly reminder that my residence was a dream state, boots never on the ground. He texted me last year to say that he bought his mom a gun for protection, she’s a math teacher, I guess I really don’t know what it’s like in Central Ohio anymore.

3. I also don’t know if I fell in love with you when I first saw the way

that peacoat collar framed your neck while we pretended to know something about hygge, or if it was the way you grabbed me by my ribcage months later:

when I tried to curl into a ball and sink into loss but I do know that your hands were a few thousand volts straight to my eyes which is not usually where I register that kind of temperature-related shock but all the more I couldn’t help but think how to know bliss is to sob into your chest hair and then fall asleep, never wake up, but the skylight was perceptive.

but it wasn’t just your face it was that it was unblemished and I wasn’t the least bit irritated by your beard or silence, only your genuine interest, flight or fight a rogue wind, face it (no), or bow to it and zip up your shoes but (wait) why are you so comforting to look at and why does doing so make the base of my stomach feel like it’s surrendering to nothing and everything in perpetuity:

4. I’m not thinking about any of this when I’m slowly lifted up and pulled down by the freezing waves. All I can see is black black black get me out of this water. I swim to the rocks, concentrating on moving my arms like I’m paddling a surfboard, trying to channel the repetition of the sea and counteract the unpredictable movement of this lake. Is this a lake? I clamber up the cliff, trying to look spry and not terrified. I think back to the first time I saw it, from the inside of a car. I often feel I can look at the Atlantic and immediately grasp the vast depth and the churning on the false horizon. I was raised to fear it, to read it, to know it as a

backyard, to swim cautiously and parallel to the shore.

5. Steady now. A surfacing then, near Bay Village. Ahead to the lake, thinking of Sugimoto, absorbing the squeal of ice sheets thinning as the sun fills the reach, wanting to understand orogeny, but

A flick of your eyes so as to avert the specific rush of contrition you thought you layered with heaviness so as to conceal for the remainder of the anthropocene at the very least, a personal moraine. But it is warming at an unprecedented rate, they screamed, and what you considered to be secure several miles beneath is now subcutaneous and malignant. Just a flick To undo, to abrade.

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