Jada Janneau

October, Broken

Rena Medow

If not the density of fruit flies in the kitchen, then the fragility of ice fractals lacing the window. If not the mouse whispering in the drywall, then the bat circling the attic, unable to sense the markable midnight breeze. If not a dream where we are looking at purple wildflowers, then waking up to the first snow on my tomato plants, some of them unpicked, still green. The mind then softly considering your grave—touched by the first snow, now and touched forever. At night you join me. We climb giant trunks of trees and sit in the audience of a never ending outdoor piazza. I ask you how it is to be gone, and you laugh at me, wearing double denim. I bring a bag of small green onions and coconut water to your parents’ doorstep, then I realize I left the wrong bag, the one with half-rotten apples covered in ants. I bike away, but the streets are all upside-down. If not the nonsense of the sleep-mind, then the depravity of the real asphalt, unchanged. Tonight, I will fall asleep rehearsing your voice in my memory, making a figment of you reassure me. At your burial, I placed some flowers on your dead ankles. And I moved your dead body with a dead sheet. You died again then, and every morning you die a little more. We buried you, but it wasn’t exactly you that we buried. You are all over town, overrunning my mind, weeds in the wind, some Debussy prelude overhead.

The longer you are gone, the more things happen. In France, bald men dig for truffles. Up in the Oaxacan mountains, old women carry large bundles of clothes on their backs to the launderías. In this dumb little town, I boil ginger root and sit on the carpet, filling a giant canvas with my mother’s garden—squash vines stretching all across the floor. I think of you in the paintbrush zinnias, in the hillside trees and the expanse of skyscrapers from the yellow cab. I feel you in the big moon, which you always thought was up to something malevolent. Now free from the oppression of light, beneath dirt on dirt on flowers on pine boughs on rocks on dirt—the shell of the body becomes what it was always meant to become. Bones and bones to energy, energy bending upwards to mushroom spores, some small green shoots come spring.

*Published in HASH Journal