The Iowa Review
MARGARET ROSS Dissolution
What things are vapor? Not the air. The nightstand and the buckled mattress, not the sheet. I take
my time. Brass knob my wrist must turn to leave, its tendons torqued stems to the long
bouquet unfolding livid colors out there on the other side, the future, what you could have done, you could have
gone and seen when you have not left, have yet to leave. Someone tell me why "an unassuming aspect of
the gas that afterwards we came to realize was." This life, how to put it down
past the sprayed-on yellow edge like a lit streak under the door beyond which people carry on
dropped voices. Here in whose studio. I always wake before. Don't stir. Dim silver bough the length of me is kindred to me, sprawled across
cool air outside, my best friend. The window's fogged yes everything does have to be seen through again again again again I run my finger down to
make a clear strip, hypodermic. Some days plucked from extinction by a sharp detail. A bird in the hall I didn't try to help, what things are
for. The sheer green skirt I lost, I left a mark, faint whiff of sulfur so the aether caught, a man had half an earlobe gone, his torso broad and blank as a door and ticking on the other side I held my hand up to the door to test and the door was hot. I was just going
to say. Quiet. Is it Nobody there? Tell me how many flights we are above the world. Can't you force me so then I could be forced to admit invulnerable live bounds, no threshold to cross. Not the voice. The floorboards and the ribbon wire. The
sky stale white of a corrective brace for the street's evacuated spine, it seems to me I've already gone
a long time. Did I ask to go
I lay down in an olive grove because the grass was gold and nobody there and some
with a blue rope tied about their girth width of a girl's thigh for what
reason I don't know. My long hair was a net unraveled
If the thought evaporates. If the thought there isn't any room for when a day slides off and the hissing trees, touch always pulls me
back up to the skin, hand the fish know, vague through the scrim of the pond and mindless as they are. Slim light
daggers about. Put your head down. Do you recognize yourself? I was trying to get to the other side of love. I had no way to go. I was standing
on a platform riddled with black holes, stamped-flat ancient gum somebody's mouth had worked the pink from. P.A. told how far things were away. Put my face down, back against slick milky
tiles sealing off the end. I was standing barefoot on dank air between the railing and a drying sweater. I was standing several inches higher than myself pitched on blue neon plastic heels. Glass necks
glittered down at me from marble shelves. I was standing still. I was. Is that what I believe? I was on something I long lay fingering the tall coarse reedy shore. It felt like candor. His throat clicks. Nobody
move. Firm limit to your will you'll never meet who were for them such slender interruption of the atmosphere I watched the sash I wanted to be
held down so there could be no brute space left to breathe, why didn't you
look, why didn't you look up and seem had you no pride weren't you free?
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The Iowa Review
Founded in 1970 and edited by faculty, students, and staff from the renowned writing and literature programs at the University of Iowa, The Iowa Review takes advantage of this rich environment for literary collaboration to create a worldwide conversation among those who read and write contemporary literature.
They publish a wide range of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, translations, photography, and work in emerging forms by both established and emerging writers. Work from their pages has been consistently selected to appear in the anthologies Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. The Iowa Review online
MARGARET ROSS Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare. She is currently a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford. "Dissolution" originally appeared in 43.2 (2013). |
This page was first displayed on January 31, 2018
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