Swamp, Draining
Kept a bike for so many years and didn’t touch it.
My sister and I wrapped it in string lights
in a tiny apartment.
In the last stretch of December
we wrapped
what we already owned.
I laid over the sink
watched myself
slow. Still walls withered
with the voice of Alex Jones. Weeks heavy
with YouTube auto–play
as our father laid stiff
beneath layers of mold.
These days
arboreal means
something, poets wear nourishment
while I shake my father’s words
off these ill–fitting clothes.
My brother confessed
once: his mind swirled with chemicals
paranoia in the
last shampoo curds. No
music in those years. Every guitar belly
teeming with dust.
It’s fuzzy; I check my cups.
I stood on the sink
cut my hair short as my new legs
grew long.
When the hair straightener burned its own cord
my sister was the one named
arsonist. What could I say
I forgot.
I forgot.
I went to the woods
the way my father wanted to, once; I
crouched at the wild edge
of an empty parking lot.
Spoke on the phone for hours
burrowing my legs in dirt
as it dried.
On the other end, a girl told me
she wanted to be a midwife.
Spoke of an unfamiliar passion for birth, for
life. I wanted
too–not something young
but new. Watched
with my head exposed
from a tangle of tree roots
for the white car, the back seat
behind that wind–whirled mullet, my skin absorbing every drop
of grease
as it blew.
I May Be Invasive
(American bullfrog)
I may have been introduced to the state of Washington during the Great Depression:
my legs the hope of a new enterprise to feed many. I may only be the opportunities
of my parts: egg, ribbon, river foam. I may barge onto your back porch. I may lie
ribboned in your wake on the dotted lines in the center of your most familiar road. I
may be the worst body you’ve ever seen—an animal you’ve never thought to know
dying, even if you know I must die. I may just be a bit of muck, hardly a bit of a
body. I suspect you may think I wouldn’t have lasted long anyway. I may have been
swallowed by a living part of your or my family. I may have eaten that part; I may be
nearly half its size. My decapitation may be well within your rights. Who am I to
deprive you of those rights. I may be destined to die for it is your environmental
obligation. I may have known myself to be invasive for as long as I have known
myself, as long as you have known me to know myself, as long as my knowing has
been known through your cutaneous knowing. I may have gotten myself into trouble
coming here. I may have fit better before you brought me. I may have only been half
your size. I know what you do to things half your size. I may be nothing like you. I
may be every part of you: egg, shining only–half–underwater–ribbon, on–my–way–out–
of–the–rundown–river–foam (if–I–can–make–it). I may of course be easily taken out
with a stunning blow. I may know what’s coming when you take my eggs from the
pond your hard hands made: one congealed summary of last hopes. I may know how
you secretly hope for someone else to eat them or for them to desiccate on their own
for the sake of one last withered attempt at understanding. I may have thought you
were more like me, or that I was more like you. I may have spent many years trying
to identify your gills while mine too should have been fading. I may feel too much,
more things than oxygen dissolved in this tenuous skin. I may be gone before I know
it, before you. I may remember one last time the way you’d greet me on our porch
back on the east coast: laughed like wind at my strange skin, still called me baby.
SOPHIE HALL writes about homes and fears, especially where the two overlap. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Nat. Brut, Passengers, and MAYDAY, among others. These days, Sophie is most dedicated to her dream journal. Find her online at sophiehallwriter.com
The art that appears alongside this piece is by AMY RENEE WEBB.
