JULIA KOOI TALEN

Again, again

After Traci Brimhall's "Vive, vive"

Today I laid on the snowy grass,
my body heavy as a sheet of freeze. Cold wet seeped
in my socks like a burn before it's felt, a softened
sting gripped my ankles. I wanted to see frozen switch
grass sideways, watch light layer, bend
rainbows off the ice globules dripped
from the flowerets. Autumn flush.

Last fall my mother wrote me a letter about her dream. In
it I was a baby, crawling on her stomach with eyes like ink pots. Tell me
a poem, she wrote, Make it this dream. I don't want to write a dream,
I want to go back to the grass, lie on my stomach, and hear my heart beat
when I place my ear to the inch of snow. Wasn't I here once? Didn't I braid
my curls and cartwheel across the lawn, twigs pressing to the bones
of my hands as I tumbled, gold blinking in the corner of my eyes, everything
so soft? Sparrow, I've built nests too, all around my fanned feet.
I've strung them with sticks and firmaments, remembering as a child I learned the shape
a cat's pupil makes after the catch, how the thinner the line
the thicker the purr, song becoming the slip of air.

But my dreams slip too. Become eyes of needles too small to thread
through to the next day. On that new year, my partner and I resolved
that we wouldn't write down any goals because we knew those goals could break
the soft cases we'd held eachother in, like the bubbles a young girl
whistles across sand. She had the champagne, I had seltzer. There was cake
and cigarettes after midnight. We couldn't kiss on the lips. But we went on about
how much we still cared. I set out the plants we'd potted in tea cups
after her birthday. I always overwatered the succulent
forgetting all the water it held into itself, but the ribbon plant never wilted.
I placed a crystal in her called hiddenite. Why is speaking so difficult?

I lick the double-prong before plugging it
into the socket's face. Speak, I whisper, my fingers
not purring after the push. I look at the thickening lines
in my hands, etched and curved like the the roots I repotted. My bed
sinks in where she used to sleep. I think of the morning shine on her nose.
Of her pulse in my held hand. The places we've cut out
on the dotted line.

The plant leaks after I water it, and the drip dribbles
to the scratch in the floor. I cry into my succulent. I want her to know how much
I tried. My insides are still too much for. She bubbles in the windowsill, I've saturated
her still. Is there another well I can dip into? Another mother
called me and told me she remembers when I was young,
I wore fairy wings in the front yard and sang. The songs
fluttered like butterflies around the tulips planted in the finger grass
circling the light post. I imagine the lines in those wings
like veins near my meridians when I lie back down,
trickling a narrow channel pocked
with choirs of holes the shape of popping sand.

Julia Kooi Talen (she/her) is a writer living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She's currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Northern Michigan University where she teaches college composition. She works as an associate editor for Passages North and reads for Longleaf Review.

Contributor note: "'breath becoming slip of air' is lifted from Amanda Maret Scharf’s poem."