The Guest

The Guest

When you arrive at the tavern,
you breathe, first, on the window,
draw a wet spiral toward the keeper inside
You have wandered
crabwise
for years ,toward this beaded light,
pulling the thread from edge to center

whistling along the periphery,
But here it is,
drawing you toward the aching and brilliant dawn
through this deep playa night.
If you follow that call
to the dimly lit threshold,
you’ll know you’ve arrived
by the catch in your throat

So there you stand,
teetering on the liminal
wood beneath your soles,
wondering,

are you welcome? You know,
peering in,
that you will sweep this cabin empty
if it is your nature,
you may raise holy moly hell
and blow pinwheels from your unholy orifices,
and even still, yes, Welcome

You knew
the moment you stepped
from the great prairie,
delivering punctuation
to the infinite
with this one word,
YES
resting on its carpetbag,
drawing its name in the sand

_Eilish Nagle

Ferry

A liminal start
three nights
running, remembering
Ruby slippers, clicking.
The way home is easy,
but somewhere back and back,
I forget the cradle
of my diaphragm,
its rocking

Now, my pedal to metal,
I can barely pause to tell you this...
that last night I finally remembered
that forgotten thing:
my third arm,
or that I’ve always spoken Cantonese,
or that my flute master
is still waiting for me,
twenty-three years later,
in her mahogany parlor.

It slapped me awake, bright and insistent,
then hopped back onto the ferry,
disappearing
with all of its rigging,
into the mist

Across the night sky,
my mother rises
at 3 am, stumbles around the house.
Every moment, now, a ferry
she has just missed,
trying to remember what she has
forgotten,
crib sheets tucked into her sleeve
with the names of the children
who cracked open her rocking pelvis
seven times.
This boat too, taken back
downriver,
this life,
an overripe berry,
dissolving,
on the tip
of her tongue

the heart of it

The thing about writing the thing you know you have to write, because of the big thing that happened, is that even afterward, especially if it's a big thing, a thing that, while you are inside of it you are so busy surviving, that the idea of pulling our your journal while you are treading water seems as ludicrous as...pulling out your journal while you are treading water, even though that journal, you know, has been a life preserver many times over.

But suddenly it is after the thing, and regardless of how long it lasted—a day, a year, or two years—it doesn’t matter, because you have been suspended in the frozen dreamlike timelessness of a car accident, though the thing wasn’t a car accident, but still, it was as if we were in a car flipping slowly, roof over tire over roof, air bags deployed, seat belts straining, for days, then months , then years, everything else flying through the air, all those things--like the double decaf latte you stopped for and I stole over half and you were mad because you love that foamy first mouthful and I always do that—that latte, not seat belted, ejected like a missile into your forehead and everything else—the ancient Tums and coins and the boots I shed when I sit down--all of the detritus of our life, suddenly shrapnel, and some, buffer, and it is clear what is one and not the other—like the thoughts they say are repeats of thoughts of the same ones we’ve had the day before, and the day before that, and you know that if you ask each one, “Are you shrapnel, or soother?” you will know pretty much immediately. And unfortunately, if you are like most of us humans, most of it is shrapnel.

But I am not here to talk about the latte or the shrapnel it becomes, and I’m not sure I’m here to talk about the buffers or airbags, although I am, because people in this kind of wreck will tell you the kindnesses that emerge far outweigh the other stuff, even more than the terror who wants to claim every inch of every breathing space, that big blowhard spreading himself out at the party, but even he can’t touch the larger generosities which arrived constantly, the meals and prayers and outrageous celebrations of life and the millions of small gestures which mean everything. Don't underestimate the impact of a short email just saying "We think of you guys every day. We're holding you in our hearts." And even now, it makes me cry to name this, because I never doubted it to be absolutely true.

And then there were the other serendipities, like the Tibetan lama showing up at my doorstep to give me the Red Tara Chant one day, out of the blue. This is the chant you remember when there is nothing in your field but blood and fear, and which I pulled out of my bag the moment the hospital called to say he had a brain tumor, and I heaved and cried every line of that chant for hours because there was nothing else to do with that fear except meet it with the name of the goddess who rides it like a dragon, and I chanted for what seemed like years…until the next call came, the one where they told us, sorry they had been mistaken, no tumor, just a squiggle, just a vein in the shape of a snake, just a hiccup on the film.

Until the next call. And so we learn about saddling the dragon.