[254 words]
Someone I love has vanished & that is why I’m in the detergent aisle of the corner store,
staring too long at spring rain versus mountain breeze,
as if scent could summon presence, as if blue plastic jugs
might carry memory like vessels across a quiet Styx.
The mind breaks in symbols. There are coins
in my pocket for a cart I don’t need.
At the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, someone’s love
is archived in the form of a toaster. Elsewhere, a jar of pickles.
Elsewhere, an axe. There’s a taxonomy to ending.
I don’t know where we fall.
I said to the nurse, he’s still in there,
by which I meant
not the shell, not the shape, but the map of me
he once carried like breath.
By which I meant
don’t speak of my father in past tense
while he’s still blinking.
The moment was unfilmed,
ordinary light—
no trembling music, no thunderclap epiphany—
just a slow refusal of recognition.
A blank glance
like a drawer that won’t open.
This is where it ends for us,
he said, or maybe didn’t.
Maybe it was silence
that said it louder.
What is the ontology of transition?
At what point does a body lose its referent?
I chew sugar-free peppermint gum like a rosary,
performing a minor liturgy among plastic jugs.
You are here, a cathedral of undone cells
in the scent of mountain breeze, which smells nothing like mountains
and everything like you leaving the room
before I knew how to follow.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, Josephine Quarterly, Meniscus Literary Journal, and Stanford University’s Mantis among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
