Glitch Girl
She is the glitch girl.
A glitch when crossing
between worlds.
“Where have I landed?” she asks.
The body knows full well.
Riverbed. Silt-soft and ancient.
The rest of her is starting to catch up.
The current that carried her
now lets her be, rolls on
beyond her glitch girl fate.
Now rock bottom is a pause.
And a permission
to reconsider her story,
and the ending she has prepared.
The river has delivered her,
but it has not claimed her.
And the body has a pulse.
It can float to the top.
It can still breathe air.
The mind is suddenly all for it.
Only the heart is a holdout.
Ghost Serve
In the prize photo of a shoebox,
she’s mid-air –
a blur of white skirt
and overhand serve.
The ball
hangs clear and vulnerable,
inches from her racket.
I can just imagine it saying
its prayers.
They said her backhand was a killer,
that she was destined for success,
if not for the war, or the wedding,
or the way the times swallowed girls whole
and spat them out as women in aprons.
There’s nothing in the box of her twenties.
It’s a gap, like the missing reel in a film
where the heroine vanishes and reappears
peeling carrots in a kitchen
with kids tugging at her skirt.
She never said she missed it.
But if ever a camera was on offer,
she’d turn, as if the lens
might catch the echo of a serve
still reverberating
in the bones of her wrist.
That photo – her poised in white,
on the cusp of motion –
is the last record of her girlhood.
Any moment now,
the racket will crack the silence.
Any moment now.
Face to Face with Munch’s “The Scream”
On a bridge – not built for crossing,
but for madness –
the sanctuary of sanity is long abandoned.
From my viewpoint,
some new sphere of terror unfolds:
the sky, a scab of blue and orange,
the fjord below, the bleached white of panic.
There are no saints here,
only shadows in the shape of men,
and I am lost, as the road to peace
is paved with echoes,
each one a relic of the mind’s undoing.
There are moments when the earth alone will not suffice –
when the scream must rise from the soles of the feet,
taste of rust and salt, and climb into the stratosphere
to look down upon the city, its bones stained
with smoke, its breath caught mid-gasp.
What have I missed here? Anything? Everything?
A gift shop sells replicas of anguish –
screaming faces etched in glass,
souvenirs of desolation.
I buy two.
One for now, one for later.