from The Failure Age
Amanda Montei
H e takes up peripatetic dialogues on the rug. She misses the violin, the sitar. “Let me spread something on you,” she says. She begs. “I have to remain active!” she says. “I have to use this body or it gets so loud!” She imagines she will attend yoga by moonlight one day, high on a skyscraper. In a spinal twist, the moon pressing patterns into her eyes, she will decide that meditative movement is the ultimate postmodern act, and will not be sure if she likes this revelation. She will not be sure about such groundlessness. “We’re here to shed our stories,” the teacher will say, a calm palm on her back. “We’re here to shed ideas.” (The night will creak like bad stairs. Nonplussed.) She will shed the idea that as a child she cried at the sight of ponytails. She will shed the idea that she was once a poor casual lover. She will shed the idea that she will ever understand what clouds are made of, and she will shed the idea that her head will never grow into itself, the way people say your feet do. She will shed the idea that the failure age is upon them, and then all the ideas will come rushing back.
She loads up her bag and fills a water bottle. “But you can move right where you are!” he says. He is on the rug, doing somersaults for exercise. Toe touches. Plank pose. She layers. Too much heat or a chill will induce regret. She won’t be able to wrestle down regret. On the walk to the park she sweats, she cries. She walks past the park. She walks to a dried-up wash because it’s the closest thing to a field around and fields, they say, inspire solace. She puts her bag down, but finds herself heavy with something else. (Empty sky?) She is in dust and concrete. She is disappointed. “There is nothing out here!” she says. “Nothing open in a field or in a wash treated as field! We do not live in fields!” she says. “We live in stone-cold houses! Rotten peach-filled apartments!” She can hear a blade of dry grass yelling something at her. Blade-friends huddled around the yelling blade. Are they whispering divine secrets? She crouches. (No one is whispering divine secrets. No one is whispering at all.) There are only muddy car tracks, carved out like craters. She sits. She cry-sweats.
from The Failure Age
Read the full chapbook online here.
