LEAVING RICHMOND
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As I stood above it for the last time,
the James carried a shroud spun from a boat, a donation of water to water. When the boat rounded the bend, its wake widened to fill the entire river ― the sight of such expansion beyond origin took up every emotion in me, a bolt of gauze gathered to my chest, a lozenge of foam & motion expressed in this curtain I bring down from the window & fold away into its box. Moving for the fourth time in four years, this gesture now mindless as the trail dragged upon water, & the water’s measure against the dock, or driving down Monument Avenue the trees passing in quick succession ― mindless as any movement made automatic which allows me, briefly, to be free of myself. This blessing floods: as I drive to my last physical therapy appointment, I am filled with no identity at all. At the clinic, the PT tells me You need to be more conscious about how you move your muscles. I balance on my bad leg five times for sixty seconds. We run through all the exercises. A current is the act of something being changed by itself. In this city, I have met many people I love. This shouldn’t be rare. It is. For this particular feeling, there are no words & that kind of silence is an easiness I’ll miss, an instinctive glance advancing between two friends who know each other well, the gift of the unsaid & the wake it trails, spreading outward & outward like a pain, like the mind & the muscles it trains to follow. |
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AUBADE IN A NEW CITY
I’ve moved into a neighborhood stocked for the infinite trials of the body:
the dialysis center, the physical therapy clinic,
the university hospital strung with garlands of revolving sirens.
6 am & the drugstore’s sign across the street
spills down its command in red text: Come in get your flu shot FREE
& it’s one of those mornings I’m tempted
if only for a hand lifting my arm, rolling back my sleeve.
The touch of another human recognizing my body
despite the brisk pain it would entail.
At my annual, my new doctor collected the history
of my family ailments,
which I validated with my name in ink
as if signing a contract.
With her hands testing & feeling the lump,
she read my body back to me ―
I’ve grown old enough now I begin
to turn dangerous.
It is easy to be angry with no one
for this. Once, out on an early walk where I used to live,
I paused to watch the baker carry a dark shape from his truck
& lift it, dead weight, to his chest:
for a second, the bag of flour could have been anything
in that morning light not yet congealed.
It could have been a person, it could have been me
& in truth I would like to be carried. Or perhaps maybe just to be guided,
from one place to the next.
Is it living in a new place which eclipses all my intuition?
Or is it just living, & how it goes on? I’m tired
of knowing all the ways we can be hurt ―
too unique & too anonymous.
I’ve woken at that hour not quite night & not quite day,
the call of unnamed birds stirring up…
it’s that moment when sight reconciles:
the sleeping child over the baker’s shoulder
rearranged into a sack of flour
as he tossed it to the ground,
making rise from the torn burlap
a spray of grain
illuminated into dusty columns by the dappled shade ―
I wish all breaking were this beautiful,
the darkness changing to light.
the dialysis center, the physical therapy clinic,
the university hospital strung with garlands of revolving sirens.
6 am & the drugstore’s sign across the street
spills down its command in red text: Come in get your flu shot FREE
& it’s one of those mornings I’m tempted
if only for a hand lifting my arm, rolling back my sleeve.
The touch of another human recognizing my body
despite the brisk pain it would entail.
At my annual, my new doctor collected the history
of my family ailments,
which I validated with my name in ink
as if signing a contract.
With her hands testing & feeling the lump,
she read my body back to me ―
I’ve grown old enough now I begin
to turn dangerous.
It is easy to be angry with no one
for this. Once, out on an early walk where I used to live,
I paused to watch the baker carry a dark shape from his truck
& lift it, dead weight, to his chest:
for a second, the bag of flour could have been anything
in that morning light not yet congealed.
It could have been a person, it could have been me
& in truth I would like to be carried. Or perhaps maybe just to be guided,
from one place to the next.
Is it living in a new place which eclipses all my intuition?
Or is it just living, & how it goes on? I’m tired
of knowing all the ways we can be hurt ―
too unique & too anonymous.
I’ve woken at that hour not quite night & not quite day,
the call of unnamed birds stirring up…
it’s that moment when sight reconciles:
the sleeping child over the baker’s shoulder
rearranged into a sack of flour
as he tossed it to the ground,
making rise from the torn burlap
a spray of grain
illuminated into dusty columns by the dappled shade ―
I wish all breaking were this beautiful,
the darkness changing to light.
Lena Moses-Schmitt’s essays and poems appear in Best New Poets, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, Devil’s Lake, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she is a publicist for Counterpoint Press, as well as the poetry editor of The Collapsar.
Born in Rome in 1989, Leonardo Magrelli holds a BA in Design and Architecture from Sapienza University of Rome. In 2010, he started collaborating with International Rome’s Photography Festival and with the photography publishing house Punctum Press. In 2014, he began working on his own. In recent years, his work has been featured in several print and online photography magazines, and has been displayed in collective exhibitions and festivals.