Issue 06
poetry
“aggregation amounts”
by Helen Perry
“Bridge to Yesterday” by Greg Turlock
the orphaning slips in, unnoticed, through the window she cracks
against sterile freeze of conditioned air / air her father demands:
pollen-free, cold / nothing to disrupt incessant blowing in brass tubes and bells.
it comes as she waits for telephone news
of another new baby—and later, waking
at night to soothe their cries.
her mother becomes a sister and her father becomes a job.
and maybe it comes on a greyhound bus from sioux city, carrying her home, sixteen,
sullen, and alone / expunged from family vacation planned with a younger set in mind.
rolling a joint in a dollar bill in a toilet stall—downtown chicago station / to smoke
among the shadows waiting for transfers to peoria, indianapolis, detroit, knoxville.
or maybe it already happened, when her brother decided
she was his / before she knew whose. but that was before
her life remembered.
alliances of siblings are tenuous.
dense rope becomes a loose tangle
frayed ends and persistent tethers.
the young spinner gazes out, her work
at her back / through a window to a story
that left her behind.
innocence is a place few afford to visit.
she pulls too hard and another shreds,
waiting walking the full length of LAX / surplus fatigues
faded desert storm undershirt / softer than her baby brother
handful of m&ms / walking, local to local to local to local
to international / terminals upon terminals / too early
for the 747 to Kuala Lumpur.
a thread snaps as she lies in her grandparents’ bed
next to her mother, hoping the distance of an ocean
will make her father smaller
in that moment. i’m gay, she says / as her mother
says we all have those
feelings / and don’t tell your father
/ evaporates
gravity /
the girl knows her mother will stand firm until
she locks eyes with him. it happens that way.
her mother will look up, he will see, and she will buckle.
mother buckles daughter
in beside her, drives straight into
the abyss / the line between help and harm is razor thin
the daughter jumps
early.
a mother invested in her own innocence
chooses
the wrong object.
the aggregation amounts to a loosely tethered
exile / may the cut
be cleaner than
this slow erasing.
*
Helen Perry writes poetry to find her way, attempting to name the unnamable by writing into the imprint of broken memories and tired taboos. As a relatively new writer, poetry functions as life force and meditative practice, a way to manage mental illness, find home in stories and ancestry, and grow capacity to hold the complexities of this imperfect world. When not writing, she designs landscapes and gardens and parents an adolescent son in Seattle, WA.
Greg Turlock is an internationally published author, poet, and photographer. His credits include “Rivers of Life,” an award-winning poem from the 2019 Alberta Arts Awards; Hightops in the Snow, his new young adult novel; “Prairie Survivors,” a photo essay in High Shelf Press; “Soul Toll on the Bay,” a short story from Horror USA: California; and “Nature’s Front Row Seats,” in Parkland Poets third anthology. Find him online at www.gregturlockcreative.com.