by Spencer Jewell
Pruned by lakewater & terror-struck by the stars or the storm
or something far more human, I wed the shape of disaster as early as
infancy – devoted to that monstrous ache that settled in my stomach
as the roof was clawed off by fits of lightning and loneliness.
I wasted nineteen years running to find the place where the grass
meets the sea. Now, on the hour hand that fells the angels like
a bird speared by the reach of wych elm, I find myself split in
two by the horizon and left behind, alone in the eye of a hurricane
with as much claim on my being as the man who poured
saltwater into my irises on that fateless summer day, pleading the
ocean to pray for me in all the ways he never could. I walk blind and
backwards through time as though chasing a dead rabbit into a
landmine, coming to know the slow descent of arcus clouds
that settle above the waves of Bay St. Louis like syruped figs over
just-warm toast. My mother sits across from me in the corner
booth of a dimly-lit diner as we watch crimson crawl across
the water. After riding out Katrina in Mississippi, the two of us
took up storm chasing and never stopped to catch our
breaths. Nineteen years of life on the road, nineteen winters
cold across the country, both of us just wild horses limping past the
front porch of our lives in search of a dawn that will never break
to save us. Remember the market in Oak Grove we crashed into
last autumn? The stag heads that hung from the wall over cans of jellied
cranberries and pineapple rings? Remember the rooms of jazz
we resided in all November? The moon’s smooth tidal pull against
the sweet bluegrasses of our earth? Our dreams of science fiction, our
indigo flames, the wandering breaths of disaster steady at our backs?
I’ve waited like a stitched violet on the verge of surrender,
lulling hurricanes to sleep in my lap – waves folding softly in prayer
to those monstrous, midnight gods of violence I grew up adoring.
Truth is an invasive desire for any rootless species, and I am crawling
like kudzu toward the last place I left it. When I find myself falling back into
the floodwaters of my childhood, I am only real when reflected in my
mother’s eyes. Every storm we endured in the South taught me that
the only way to reconstruct history is to write myself out of it, so this time
let the world end during a nice breakfast. Let me rebuild the banks of
our story from the very beginning, steeping chamomile in stormwater
and pouring a mug for my mother with a shakiness of hand that spells out:
I forgive you. I’m sorry, with enough apologies brewed to stretch around the
booth three times. Jesus, let us drink to the end. Then, one last hunt
through the backwoods of Mississippi, tracing each stream back into my palms
before our first family’s levees were ever overrun. Katrina, I’m a writer
because I see myself in all the landscapes you ravaged, and because
I know eyes like yours. I have loved at your mercy every day of my life. I have
worshiped you at your most merciless. Your psalms have absolved
and unearthed me, and I can no longer live in a world that isn’t spinning.
I was born to listen to your stories on this front porch, beneath the Spanish moss.
Stay with me. I’m trying to arrive at the truth from the side, so it won’t see me
coming. Nightly, I am serenaded by your helpless horizons. You return in
my dreams: the first set of stormy eyes I ever adored. Mother, you are the hardest
home I’ve stumbled into, and I will be searching for you for a very long time.
Spencer Jewell (she/her) is currently a student and creative nonfiction editor in Bellingham, Washington. She has self published six poetry books, lived in seven states, and considers herself to be an almond croissant connoisseur. Right now, she’s probably hosting a tea party or praying for rain from her kitchen window.