Melt
by Lea Claire
The thaw has set in.
Cold, but the mountain sun has a strength that I’ve never known before.
I’ve only known the sky as shroud.
The cars rush by, relentless, until the record
skips,
break.
In the silence, the meltwater
slips down icicle-bodies,
onto ledges,
onto leaves,
onto pavement.
Wet trickle tickles the fine
hairs, inner ear spirals out of
control. It sounds like rain
but isn’t. I sat under the roof-
window in the bathroom, the
window open, parallel to the
floor, and watched the
raindrops up close and from
afar, hanging in sheets around
the church steeple. I found
the bottle of pills here, my
mother’s, fluoxetine. The
word for depression in
Danish is depression.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I see each droplet glinting
as the late
sun
hits
at an angle.
Fall,
sparkle,
wink.
Part the beaded curtain with parched hands.
Their plastic facets can cut as easily as any
diamond. Let them tangle in my split ends,
the tiny pop as the follicle gives. Pop, the
sound of the childproof cap on the bottle of
powder pills, new name every month as
we discover nothing changes. Night sweats,
cerebral zips, brain tracks, miss a dose. Can’t
follow the world when I twist my neck.
The water rushes from
the gutters, snaps and
crackles against asphalt,
falling from a great
height.
The rhythmic echo.
It bounce-booms in
between alley walls,
whisper-soaks forgotten
newspapers, slithers
down slick creek-stones.
From the middle of the
bridge, the water is green.
I know it’s moving, but here,
in the deepest part, it looks
frozen.
Milk drop,
mint tea.
Mor reads out loud to me in
bed, the plate on my knobby
knees, green-and-white slices
of apple wobble. My
child-mind, do I make her sad?
No. But I will.
We used to walk along flat winter beaches, the ice like a
floating jigsaw,
the horizon hazy and amorphous in its whiteness. The cold
is familiar and undaunting, it burns the tip of my nose and
forces my eyes to squint. It brings a silence that is mighty,
pressingmychild-bodytogether, condensing the heat in my
chest.
I pulsate.
I hold my mother’s hand, my
father’s, walk across the gray
wooden bridges with no rails,
discover the spots where the
ice is clear, not cloudy. The
stillness draws me closer; my
dad holds on to the back of
my jacket as I lean,
too far.
My mother tells me about
the time my tears froze on
my cheeks and she picked
them off with her fingernails.
Danish babies parked outside
in prams, in freezing
temperatures, tiny
white-and-red faces
peering out from under
heavy snowsuits,
matted sheep-skin,
and up at
opalescent skies, soft white eyes