STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
AMY ASH
Telephone wires strung like guitar strings, like lines
in a composition book. No fingers touching music,
no sound, no words. Nothing is written.
Stay in the lines, the teacher tells my daughter, still learning
to harness the rough swirls and loops of her letters,
her lowercase g like a lasso, flung into to open air
and grassland where no animals graze, grasping. She is writing
about Grandpa, how sometimes he didn’t have words, how everything
is filled with the words he didn’t have.
Not even birds punctuate the empty sentence. Everything erased
by smudged sky. Here, nothing is written, not even elegy.
I keep looking to language, as I do, but the phone lines
are tubes secured to an IV pole, the clouds are hospital gray.
We searched the MRI for signs of recurrence. It was like an explosion,
the surgeon said of the tumor in your brain, like the tumor exploded.
There are no fireworks in this sky to serve as metaphor
for this. Only emptiness. I’m waiting for the sun
to tear through like a bullet hole
but it never does. Our grief is not that quick and exact.
If birds are here, I don’t see them.
If birds are here they are stripped of song.
One year later I look to this landscape. There is no sun
hanging like an obscene pill, stuck in the throat, in the throaty gray
above, the phlegmy clouds. The landscape is waiting
to be shaped into meaning. The ground rough and beige, is the blanket
pulled over you when we said we were ready. We lied.
One year after your death, I am the one left
without words. Someone painted a white line on the road,
dividing black from blur. Someone said, step over it. And then you did.
Announcing our local county fair, the newspaper headline reads:
Time to set aside your dignity: It’s the season for elephant ears.
The season of heat and sweat and spinning, it is June, and I am still
telling time in days since my father’s passing, still trying to carve
direction in a life of loss. Walking this gauntlet of chaos and color,
I buy my daughter everything she asks for, the rides all rumble and clatter
around us, and we feel it in our chests, this heaviness we cannot name.
Even the cheap plastic necklace in her hands recalls the rosary my father held
every day as he was dying. She pulls too hard, and the necklace
breaks apart, scattering beads across the asphalt. One state away,
a carnival ride breaks loose, flinging passengers to their deaths.
She cries, and I usher her to the picnic area, offer her the treat we bought,
sweet dough the size of a dinner plate. We all know about
elephants and grief, how they gather to mourn, and remain for days,
a circle of stillness and silence, Holding the ear in her upturned hands,
she leans into it and whispers.
Amy Ash is the author of The Open Mouth of the Vase (Cider Press Review, 2015). She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Indiana State University.
