REMNANTS
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After the storm I mimic my pre-storm self.
I try not to break my ankle and I try not to get murdered, with only a sliver of moon as my guide. I coax my body away from the edge of fever. I tell it to sleep. I tell myself to think and form words and to plan for tomorrow. I am subsisting on the promise of future cheese which is, I suppose, a way of returning to self. The academic calendar brings all the old feelings. The need for chainsaw sharing brings the neighbors together and for the coming week people wave at me when I jog past them and ask me about the status of my home when they draw my blood or ring up my groceries. A man nearly backs into the security guard at a parking garage. She is not looking but I yell out to her and she jumps away. We each move in tandem to squeeze the other’s shoulder, so happy are we that she has not been crushed, so united are we in this new understanding of our position as inhabitants of a coming underworld. We need to stick together or something. We need to crawl out. A woman on the internet imagines a future where our features can be removed and redrawn to our liking. She imagines the in-between stage as a completely featureless face. I am horrified by the image but mostly I am impressed that she is still able to imagine a future. I contemplate less impactful ways to disappear into a forest. I am giving myself a little wooden anniversary. I dig deeper into the part of me made sad by certain music and listen exclusively to those songs. It is an autumnal way to live. A turning, a tuning. |
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Caroline Cabrera is the author of Saint X, winner of the Hudson prize and forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in January 2018. Her previous collections are The Bicycle Year and Flood Bloom. She is editor of Bloom Books from Jellyfish Magazine and teaches with two nonprofits, Innovations for Learning and the O, Miami Poetry Foundation. She lives in Fort Lauderdale.
Sarah Malakoff’s large-scale color photographs are examinations of the home as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. She has had solo exhibitions at Camerawork Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; The Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Vermont; the Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts; and Plane Space in New York, New York. She received 2001 and 2011 Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2011 Fellowship from the SMFA, Boston. A monograph, Sarah Malakoff: Second Nature, was published by Charta Art Books in 2013. She is an Assistant Professor at UMass Dartmouth and her work can be seen at www.sarahmalakoff.com.