Even the Rocks Turn Away When We Look at Them

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R Rice

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She wakes to find herself 
far from home, from family, the tent sweltering 
under glass-hard sky. Those stirring 
around her, all of them, on their way,
they hope, somewhere else. For a moment 
she’s still, lost in the moving of her body’s 
own blood, trying not to think of Antonio, five, 
on the other side…somewhere,
or her husband’s tremors, 
the progress of his agony as he died. 
Distrust like the rub of salt
on raw skin, menace in the camp pressing
like heat against her life, she wonders 
when survival became a sin, the future 
an empty sleeve, when hope dissolved
into deepening catches of breath.

She wakes to find herself
far from herself, night in her mind, aware only
of the empty side of the bed.
His going absolute, their history mostly 
what he meant when he said the word “I.” 
She waits for something that matters to happen, 
doesn’t remember if she turned off the stove, 
emptied the bath. Voices outside 
chisel sound into the morning, wake the child
whose cries force her up. She starts to say
something, lets it go. To voice it makes it 
impossible to ignore 
the choices she should have, surely would have, 
made, the fuck-ups, the steady drip of failure.

She wakes to find herself 
far from the shelter, in a doorway, clatter 
of footsteps nearby. Her nights mostly 
fog and forgetting, a shovelful of sleep 
to help her bear the scorn. Vaguely 
she remembers the slow breaking-apart, 
the piss-driven screeds shoved into her
like splinters, visits to the prison,
shrugs on both sides of the glass. 
Her body’s need for drink 
hot in its flowering and none 
of the mind’s business, she’s done 
with fear and other useless emotions, 
unawareness her only comfort, exhaustion 
a kind of wisdom, simply less of her to die.

And when you go there, when you finally allow yourself 
to go there, they will hold you until you forget
why you feared to come.

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R Rice’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary magazines, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Manoa, New Letters, The North American Review, Quiddity, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. Rice’s chapbook Space that Carries Light Forever was selected by Jane Hirshfield as one of two chapbooks in the Wildhouse competition to be published in 2024, and one of the poems has been submitted for a Pushcart Prize.

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