Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm

Author:Claire Wahmanholm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

 at the end    , we turn

blue        beyond

 imagining .

we are in pain no

soft meadows

     here

  , but our search for them

 is

long

,

  longest

.          at the

bottom of a deep well.

we

cast no shadow

BEGINNING

A pulling began from nowhere. Book bindings came unglued, hairline cracks cobwebbed the backs of our hands. Caught in this force we could not call by name, we waited. Down by the river, no more boats. Even the docks had been uprooted and stacked on the shore. For a long time we tried not to move, tried to feel in the air where the pulling was coming from. Groups of us stood with our index fingers licked and raised. How long did we stand before we put our hands to our chests? Irregular thumps. Just there, just here. Kaleidoscope of wrong rhythms. Looking at the night sky, we could see new patches of darkness coming alive. Mornings were suddenly birdless, cloudless, without wind, bright deserts. Now we began to wonder whether we had done wrong things. Or rather, which of our wrong things had been wrong enough. Putting our hands out in the dark of our basements, we felt gaps in the limestone where there had been none. Quarries filled overnight with unidentifiable slurry. Rotten fish slapped their rotten smell on the riverbank. Something was going to happen, had already begun happening, and no one wanted to be here when it finished. There was one way out of the city. Under the streets, a set of sewers led to the sea. Very carefully, we lowered ourselves into their metal mouths, leaving all the lights on in our houses. Whatever was watching us might be fooled. Xenon lamps shone like suns from the sewer walls, burning our skin. Yarn unspooled behind us as we walked deeper and deeper in. Zero—as in ground, as in vanishing point, as in where the reckoning begins.

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