None of It Is Imagined
Lit Up: Spring Prompt — Reality
Sitting still, cool breeze on skin signals Spring as left ear hears the grumble of a plane through the open patio door. On the other side of the shuttered window, right ear hears the engine echo off the buildings. Eyes closed, the rumble moves overhead over roofs until the sounds for a moment become one. Plane propels until it’s gone.
Down the chimney, wind whistles in over the ash of winter’s fires into the room where we sit. The snore of old dogs at my feet while young pups yap in the distance. I wander. #12 sits vitrified in a dish somewhere I will never go. In a month, #12 will travel from device to uterus to thaw in me.
Neon green flickers inside eyelids, fluttering lashes over swollen sinuses breathing sound. My chest, skin like canvas over stretchers, the painting inside, a clock talking all the time.
Another plane grumbles, and back I go to left ear. Heart interrupts, “I’m varnished in your sadness,” she says. “I think that’s ok”, I say. “I feel old”, she groans. “That makes sense”, I say. “Will you hold me?” she moans. “I always do”, I say. “I don’t always feel it”, she thumps. “But I feel you.”
The house is quiet. And then there is a siren in the distance, the crow in the air, the cackle of a carer of the neighbor next door. Heel taps, and fridge hums, and here another plane comes.
“Come back to me”, heart throbs. “I’m here”, I say. “But you left”, she trembles. “Let me feed you”, I sigh.
Slowly sipping air, I slip behind the fractalated darkness, under the electric pulse, inside the haematopoietic bones, stitched between it all is a core of cold fire. Because of this, I go far from this warm body, so far from this hot earth.
And again, a plane returns. Come back. So I do. I come back to this salty heart, warm her fear, live her beat, and when I move, I will boom across this earth with the will of a tender engine alive with love and longing.
© Camilla Meshiea 2022
