The Iowa Review
MARGARET ROSS Responder
Dim presence, where do we belong? Out in a far-flung mind I spent numb seconds counting possible homes. Pale self
those marble bodies of the long-ago dead were polished till they're sweating under overheads you feed
a coin into the wall to keep on. Last a minute, about. The steep white slope her neck cuts brightest, head flung back out of definition. Where her face shades out the mania begins:
are you there are you there. It's the dream of never needing company, not speaking for however many hours, sometimes days I walk up to this stone place on the hill then back again. Wonder between. Then bunked below a man night air groans in and out of. There's some square heavy thing up on a high shelf in my chest that gets
pushed off, it keeps happening. Pigeons swishing just above the hostel ceiling THAT I SHOULD SOMETIMES HAVE THE FOLLOWING
VISION: I SAW AN after curfew, strangers' bodies harden into sleep, their cells charge sky blue squares, occasional chime, a guest, my skin gone dark. Lights off. Mornings I eat peaches till my hands stick shut, the evenings here are bronze sieves we get sifted through, my habits pestled finer now, a powder blown about a dilute ANGEL VERY NEAR ME, ON MY
LEFT, IN CORPOREAL FORM, WHICH IS NOT USUAL WITH ME FOR THE static sequence tries to resolve: in this life we're little first and then the objects each get touched
by pin and air let slowly out so you might feel you're large and it's called getting older. But nothing changed. What I spend of life is given back to me unaltered, another day a slightly different temperature but otherwise
but otherwise the same. Reply the numerals ARE OFTEN REPRESENTED to my mind. From their stacked beds rise. Am I close to him? Then broke up into multiples, to restless, wireless
heights the calculating spirit tends, its satellite mild-gleaming in dead air no breath pollutes. Look down and tell me what I'm doing there TO ME AND YET IT IS WITHOUT
MY SEEING THEM the mine from which the marble was cut from which I was five. I was a child for the first time
permitted to record the message. It was in the days of answering machines. AND AT THE ARROW'S just wings scuffling against the roof. You only walk up from the square and put your coin in and the light stays
on however many cents you've paid of time. It's what I come to see, the glare about her loose white arm carved limp as tissue POINT THERE
SEEMED TO BE A LITTLE FIRE. HE APPEARED TO ME I afterwards begged to be walked out to the corner, quarter passed from fist to mouth was sour to tongue
I slid it wet into the slot and bought my own voice telling me I wasn't there, "please leave-
I had a little life it was a pin to keep me fixed down to the ground a specimen in time its silver head my minute mirror to a single prick of color unattached
Black cashmere tightening its orbit at the throat of a tourist penciling the flexed foot of the Ecstasy in his notes. Did you feel it ring? Make me recall
my sense through varicose marble to convey to the changing current "I will let, I know the edge, I wanted to go" on
the map we used to own that was what is beneath me, thumbtacks sunk into such delicate sky-blue water. Overheard
myself in the bar where the dates are chipped out of the wood ask a stranger which it was and how many I've been gone, each one with a private ledge
and a long way down that was passage "that was just a number I told you to give you an answer."
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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. "Responder" originally appeared in 43.2 (2013). |
This page was first displayed on February 13, 2018
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