Seasonal Catalog: Fall
As a child, I watched the lifeguards clasp hands — a human trawl — wade into the whitewash
for the body of a girl who never surfaced.
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Somewhere else an ocean is unbroken by rain. Girls in the dark become the dark don’t they?
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Each morning that troubles my breath back to speed is another chapter in my disappearance
story. The promise that haunts me: You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
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Was there sand beneath my feet, or was there a television screen between me and the not-body?
Proximity never mattered when it came to disaster: every pretty face they broadcast
taught us to grow buoyant, grow unnoticed, grow jagged with car keys.
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The heel scrapes, the steering wheel escapes me, a city street crests up to gouge the kneec
completely: Autumn, one long lesson in what makes the body breakable.
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Two thousand eight hundred twelve miles I count between me and the Pacific, and still it culls
and culls me.
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A siren croons its lullaby from the sea of passing headlights. Trapped in a contraption to
keep my bloodied knee from bending, sleep fights me off with worry — what will
happen if I have to run?
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Instead of sheep, I count the things I know to be true: it would take 6,767 of me to drag
the ocean belly-deep; too late in the year for such heat; to be born girl is to enter
the world already missing.
* * * * *
The Night Before Allison’s Funeral
I laughed. I dragged
the best friend I had left alive
to the bar, the one we knew wouldn’t card,
and I laughed and I flirted and took a guy
by the hand to the upstairs bathroom,
and let him (or did I beg him to?) drink me in, out
of myself, out of the burning building
of my body. I’m so sorry I needed to be
so alive before the dirges were sung:
newly tattooed, beer-buzzed, and holding tight
to a boy who glowed in the dim stall like an Exit sign.
* * * * *
Seasonal Catalog: Spring
The skin-raking yowl at 4 AM sounds like a girl in trouble, though I know now it’s pupping
season, the low hills swollen with a symphony of coyotes.
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Friends who still believe in god talk about life in seasons. Everything ends. Everything comes
back again.
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Spring is always the season after the season after she left, after she died, after she died, after she
gave you no choice but to survive her.
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I scroll fast past the part in the article that wants me to know the likelihood of coyote pups
making it through summer. Is this what the birthing sounds like, or a warni
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Reading about our collective fascination with missing girls — for research — I learn that a girl will
be good or a girl will be dead and somehow I’m neither.
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It haunts me, the way Allison’s father howled when I asked to borrow her first bear — the source
of our nickname for each other—one more piece of her disappearing. There is
something so animal in grief. There is no name in our languages sufficient for that
sound.
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It is always the season after the season I’m afraid the one missing is me.
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Friends who still believe in god call this the season of resurrection. Last winter, I swerved to
avoid a coyote splayed on the highway, looked away. Now they regenerate. Now they
sing me awake.