Risen Again
Anything can be a time machine. For us it was the elms grown crooked into each other, knobby-rooted & shooting nine-stories into the sky. I named one Risen Again for how it branched down into dirt then up again, snakelike, hiding places for me & the others. But it transported only me— & Nieve. We could disappear into its corkscrewed trunk & be two places at once for I’d found a way to split myself. What the grownups didn’t know: enough to dredge the river cemetery where we’d play hide & seek & never find. Enough to send us where they no longer existed. But the boy the color of an oak casket who guarded me in the tree’s clearing so I could cross would no more make it to adulthood than any of us. I knew that about him & loved him anyway. What did it feel like, splitting? Like ice pops against summer heat bare feet scalding asphalt & eggs dropping on sidewalk to test a theory. We fried ourselves like sizzling pork fat plucked from the comal & dipped in chile. We held our whole bodies like a tree after anyone had tried to chop it down. A time machine can be anything can be one’s own body. I used to catch rattlers in the foothills for five bucks a snake. I’d leash each snake’s neck so it couldn’t strike then pinch between gloved fingers into a bag for the exotic animal collector next door. Splitting felt like that like that, like catching but also getting caught. Whichever way I twisted felt like shedding skin felt too tight. Whichever way I turned felt like out.
--- Jenn Ghivan, published in The Offing
