Letter about springtime / demolition / blur / etc.

Mark, I know it was you who graffitied that snarling mouth on the power station right before it got torn down, but you could be a whole lot worse — you could have been behind the sprawling arms of Sharpie’d swastikas on the gym lockers, or the tulips by the statehouse, uprooted, eaten whole, like trying to survive Dutch winter hunger or the chill that froze us over last March, or the storm that followed and grounded the powerlines, grounded homeward planes midway between O’Hare and JFK, or the northern-southern tension that seized and released asphalt into potholes, or Marquest, the Red Line driver who always hit the potholes too hard, or the armed officers not mending potholes — you could have left it unapologized that day you lost it and lobbed a shoe at my mouth (I saw it in your eyes: You had become your mother momentarily, you had become an amoeba again, minuscule, single-celled, withering in a pool of green algae soft as the inside of your coat), Mark, I’ve seen you cry twice, once there, next to me on the floor while my lip oozed blood in the shape of a stiletto heel, once at my garden when I showed you the first tomato blossoms of the year, and you said, “They’re so beautiful,” which was out of character but at least you didn’t elaborate, and we got back on our bikes, rode over the bridge where your tag glistened on every piece of sheet metal and at least it wasn’t you kneeling below, sifting yourself through broken glass and silt, calling for water; at least, when you said, “Guess my favorite word,” the answer was ciudad and not something stupid like “enumerate,” and at least you didn’t look back when we spun too fast past the power station, where it was crumbling and already blocked off by yellow-black ligaments, and you didn’t claim the painted teeth, rotting like everything was rotting, the ice only a faint breath over a place that dwarfed us, a place that would regrow around us after we’d gone, like continents 

merging backwards into Pangea.

Jocelyn Royalty is a freshman in the creative writing program at the University of Maine at Farmington. Previously, she attended the ACES Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, Connecticut where she focused on creative writing as well. She also interned at the Yale Alumni Magazine under Mark Branch. Her work has been published in the Parhelion Literary Magazine, Capulet Magazine, Voice of Eve, and The River.

A Song for Jocelyn