By Terra Brigando
The morning sky offers little to hope for,
just another day reciting the different ways to conjugate
haben or sein. What ugly
words – not the France I wanted,
croissants at noon, a sheet of white silk
draped over a tanned shoulder, the elegance
of red wine on an evening swimming
in stars. My mother
is worried about me
and I know this. Even across the Atlantic I’m still
a little girl, crying in bathrooms with peeling wallpaper,
staring at the words on the edge
of the stall, “Anna fucked like a dog.” Such elegance.
Elegance being the idea of grace. The idea of a word
brought to life. Fucked
is what I say. My mother writes me e-mails –
don’t do anything to yourself, she says. I write
back, “I’m just waiting for the snow to melt, I just want
to go swimming.” Today starts out normal
but by nightfall my skin will have become transparent
and all lucidity will have left through my fingertips.
And slippery, these days, just doesn’t cut it. I slipped.
I’m slipping. Slipping to where? My mother asks. Not into
grace, that simple fool of a word. My heart
is slipping
slowly toward my feet. I can feel the weight of it
against my thighs, then my shins, the small triangles of bone
that are my ankles. Sopping heart. “I’m just waiting
to go swimming.” I’m just waiting for the sky to lift
from the ground, to offer me some sort
of hope. Like elegance wrapped in tissue paper, like the sun
peeking through the white, white sky, saying:
“No, the snow won’t hold you here for long,” and promising
“Tomorrow,” and “Yes, tomorrow you can go
swimming.”
*Author’s bio: Terra Brigando recently graduated from the University of Redlands with a B.A. in creative writing and had a poem published in the February issue of “decomP: a literary magazine.” She was the fiction editor of the university’s literary magazine, the “Redlands Review,” and has published various works in “Giraffe,” the university’s underground literary magazine.
