Postcard Union Pacific Transfer Depot, Council Bluffs, Iowa One day you wake up in a town you can’t name and there’s no way to plot a path from A to B. You hear a train, then you don’t, the sound bounces off the hills, gets trapped in a gulley or skims a church spire only to scatter over a silo that dreams of nothing but thunder and grain. Who says the route is not the shortest distance between two points, says it’s a branching river and you must get in your little boat and paddle down each grassy inlet and tiny stream—as if sets of unreadable alphabets opening beneath your feet and clambering over fence posts were a good thing? I don’t want to come to the edge of myself, don’t want that sinking towards a bottom that never seems to come. Sometimes I’m held together with pins and strings. I’m pieces of fabric, a dress waiting to be seamed, or I’m the stitches ripped out, threads blown across the floor. I want to lie on a cool, clean sheet, feel it drape over my face, arch my back like a cat, be reduced to nothing but bone, the big wind that races across the field, bend the trees back, push clouds, be shadow, whip past blouses hanging on the line like women waiting for their lives, all of it silver and into the sun. Previously published in Tramp (LSU Press, 2018). Joelle Biele is the author of Tramp and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence. A Fulbright professor in Germany and Poland, she is currently the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s Writer-in-Residence, doing writing workshops with Maryland high school students. Comments are closed.
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Blog HostNatasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a licensed naturopath in WA State. Enjoying this blog? Feel free to put a little coffee in Natasha's cup, right here. Archives
October 2019
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