Like This

    cynthia marie hoffman

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Before things got bad, the bad part of your mind was still asleep. You walked with your mother along the playground’s edge. Like this, you said, and your mother lifted the camera. You were a flower still blooming, not knowing what it was. Crouched among ferns, you could barely feel the soft arrows pointing you out from all directions, pale spot in a clutch of green. Meanwhile, your sister’s swing swished through the field and lulled backwards again, the blur of her yellow dress. The bad part of your mind was a leaf slick in the rain, a clinging slug. Not even your mother, not even you knew it was there. In the picture, ringlets dangle at your ears. Even then, whispers of angels funneled through their golden halls, but you don’t hear them. The bad part of your mind is still asleep. Meanwhile, the faint smear of light trailing behind your sister’s body dissolved and was drawn again. What did you think your life would become? You were a flower still blooming, not knowing what it was. Tonight, the moon with barely a face formed on it.

 

 

Synaptic
 

Cynthia, all this time you have not been alone. Not even in your own mind where I walked with you through the maze of hills, though you didn’t know I was there. Snaps of light shot past us in the darkness like stars on their way somewhere, busy with intention. As soon as your child was born, a blue spark of fear charged past. Your mind is a tangle of black threads, each a pipeline of invention, this one through which your daughter is swept from her blanket and through the window of brilliant stars. Cynthia, you have not been alone all this time. Deep in the night, reason is still with you, hand in hand, watching the sparks fall in the valley. Just over the hill, a small girl, either your child or yourself, runs off toward the future and disappears. The both of us, our hairs standing on end.

 

 

 

Waters

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In the morning, the cat licks the droplets from the glass. Leaves flicker across the glass door in their torn brown dresses. Cynthia, you have lost something. It has been so many years you cannot remember what it was. How a fish slips from the bay and into the open sea unnoticed. You have lost something and you know it standing in the kitchen folding a slice of bread. Beneath your working hands, the dark countertop with its flecks of silver expands in all directions toward a glittering infinity, your life speeding away from you. I have known you since you were a little girl collecting tadpoles from the creek. They always turned into something. You think about the bucket you kept them in sometimes, don’t you? The water thick with tiny pointed bodies turning like compass needles searching for north. Mornings you walked outside to the porch and found only the shallow cylindrical pool sloshing against its walls. The fish gone into the air. Haven’t you learned anything by growing old? Cynthia, there is still magic in the world. The dark muscle of your heart flexing against the tide and letting go.