Sara Renee Marshall

Letters for Others: HBM

Dear H:

I think I know what you mean by a woman—any. Escape makes visible her off-rhythm rattle through seasons. Time in her is land—spare gravel shivering—and surface a series of energetic peaks. 

Under one pleated cloud shelf, threadbare clouds.

To be clear, I am actually traveling, not kiting my bodied wits or borrowing Pacific, heading off horizon’s real curve, a pastel city of plaster figurines cupped in fog. Or just three names silhouetted. When my neighbor says fancy, I know I’ll feel hunger, I’ll eat up ahead, have whole considered conversations temporarily strained into clean words: school, heat, peaches. A fainted lilac. I appreciate what stays still in absentia.  

For now, my house, a static L-shape, means nothing and yet raves murmurs as through a tunnel, begs favor—my distance populated by freedom.

H, I mean to tell you I also died. Here I am deserted in a negative, looking backward at outline. Future still delivers me as an emergency to my past. Not a tree lurches or apologetically kneels. Only keywords for stories keep shuttling—and keep. 

Through a porthole, the wing with me, and the two of us miraculously fly.