Love in the time of distance; Someone to Carry On With; I am most myself when someone is holding my hand

photo by Allison Guan

by Shana Ross

Love in the time of distance

I tell her I have been re-reading Gertrude. She says I would write your autobiography. Referentially.  Unironically. Lovingly. Unwilling to trace possibilities to their dead-ends in the maze printed on the paper placemat, one fingertip at a time over and over until the future has been seen.  A marble run, a domino track, a Rube. Set off and unwatched.  We go about our day but in my ears is the clattering.  Cause pushes effect down the road for someone else to deal with and it’s the sky that’s falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling because it is predictable, even if clouds. I freeze like a dead rabbit.  It’s what I want.  Let me be interesting without flaying myself. It’s too late to vivisect once the wounds are open but I can bare them.  Bear them. She says she loves me but she would take my picture at an angle, peeled back and pinned open.  Is it better if someone else’s hands do the typing? Disco nails and a daisy wheel, metal and real, more true than anything I can say about myself. I cast myself in wax, ruffled like lettuce and dipped green, eternal in the glass display.  I have always been a lie to stoke your hungers. She tells my story, she talks about me like I have always been real.

Someone to Carry On With

Rose and I make knots in each other’s threads as we unspool.  Tying down the same memories twice so they can’t escape.  We’re originally from the late seventies so why wouldn’t our lives turn out macrame, hanging from a hook in the ceiling and holding. A bit of wet dirt, something green and living with shallow roots.  We are months into a phone call debating the Baburnama, and Emma Goldman, and my son’s slovenly habits, and her daughter’s anxiety.  Her sugar is high and I am not sleeping and both our jobs are too tight at the shoulders. We suck in and zip up daily and hope that if we stand straight and remember not to speak with our hands, no seams will burst.  We keep thinking things might settle down next week.  Her mother probably does not have bedbugs and I did not invite mine to the bar mitzvah. We both feel guilty, especially during hurricane season.  We measure and compare our relief in those shameful distances, decide for each other that it’s worth the ache.  We mother each other when we can. She stubs her toe while we are on the phone.  You see, it’s always something she screams.

And I laugh, god help me, I laugh.

I am most myself when someone is holding my hand

As long as our locked fingers are not trying to pull us anywhere I just want the damp squeeze to lock onto and remember. My own coherence.  A little pressure. Something to organize my molecules. Gravity is the same as intention is the same as a spell is the same as a snake.  If the year is a snake, the head has teeth.  I am the ghost of all my old dreams. It’s natural to be forgetful, at times.  Especially when I have a hard time sleeping.  Most women do, at this age.  Instead of ribs, I count the ways I know how to speak: to myself, to an audience, a faceless packed house, to a friend, to a student, to a room where no one is listening, practicing to be someone else.  On the tv it is a tragedy when the old man dies.  It is the two left living who stiffen into a new relationship.  You are the only witnesses. We are supposed to be sad, but I will be glad when I am unseen.  I hate the way I look in pictures. A woman can’t have wings, but if no one else is looking, it feels like I could fly.  Like I said, it’s easy to lose myself if I’m not paying attention.  When I dream of the wild west, I do not long for button boots or horses or laudanum haze. Alongside the layers of brutality, a green vein of freedom – a chance to name yourself in each new town when you arrive, nothing to tie you to your past. 

Shana Ross is a newcomer to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty 6 Territory.  Qui transtulit sustinet.  Her work can be found in Whale Road Review, Ninth Letter, Grain, Literary Review of Canada and more. She holds two degrees from Yale, a union card, and membership in the Canadian League of Poets.

Allison Guan is a poet and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area. In her free time, she can be found falling down Wikipedia rabbit-holes and figuratively consuming textbook pages.